ideasIdea
Partial lottery funding for good proposals in under-funded cancers
Once a proposal in a neglected cancer passes a quality bar, pick winners by lottery instead of by tiny differences in review scores, which mostly reflect fashion.
Reviewer scores in the middle of the distribution are nearly random and are known to favour established fields and safe applicants. For pancreatic, oesophageal, glioblastoma, sarcoma, mesothelioma and other neglected cancers, a funder would run a two-stage process: a rigorous pass/fail quality gate, then random selection among passes. This removes fashion bias, lowers the cost of applying and reviewing, and makes it easier to enter a new field.
Hypothesis
Lottery-selected awards in neglected cancers produce outputs (papers, replications, follow-on funding, trials started) at least equal to score-ranked awards, while attracting a broader pool of applicants, more first-time entrants to the field and shorter proposals.
Rationale
The Swiss National Science Foundation, the Health Research Council of New Zealand and the Volkswagen Foundation have used partial lotteries with no measurable loss of quality; the Health Research Council found applicant time and reviewer load fell. Modified lotteries are now recommended by several meta-research groups.
What would test it
Randomised funder experiment: among proposals passing the gate, half are funded by score rank and half by lottery, then compare five-year outputs and applicant diversity.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
philanthropy
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
3
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Funding follows fashion, not burden · Money goes to the cancers and questions that are easy or popular, not the ones that kill most or where a dollar would do most.