In my very first blog I wanted talk about our Scientific Committee and how it works to support our activities.

Committees can be our eyes and ears

As a charity we are governed by a Board of Trustees which has overall responsibility for our strategic direction. The Board often seeks additional advice and input to inform its decisions and so has several sub-committees to focus on particular areas. One of these is the Scientific Committee which is composed almost entirely of active research scientists, and which provides advice primarily on our role as a funder. It helps us stay up to date on the current scientific landscape and where our funding can add most value. It sounds obvious, but so often charities are led by well-meaning people who maybe have been, but are not currently, at the coal face of the issue the charity works on. And if there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the years it’s that change doesn’t come from outside.  So, we ensure that our work supporting research, scientists and research establishments is led by those currently working in them.  

The issues we are facing

Over the past year we’ve been reviewing what and how we fund science, and have come to some difficult decisions. While the FRAME Lab was utterly unique when it was founded and still does fantastic in vitro science, there are questions about whether funding one lab in what is now a much more distributed NAMs research landscape, is the best use of our funds. Also our grant schemes were set up to meet specific identified gaps in the funding landscape, but that landscape has changed, so we need to know where the gaps are now and ensure we’re not duplicating effort.  

So many ideas!

These are the conversations we had at the Scientific Committee meeting and there were some great ideas and suggestions. For example, a researcher identified a national gap in funding for collecting patient tissue or other samples within the NHS, and so we discussed broadening our grant criteria to specifically include eligibility for research nurse funding. This led to a broader conversation about how to engage clinicians with the issues we are discussing.  

A second point raised was about whether we would have greater impact by funding time and travel for researchers to be able to visit other labs and learn new techniques relevant to their research, thus growing the base of researchers able to engage in NAMs research.  

Lastly, there was a discussion about some spheroid and other models which might be amenable to being stored. This opens up the possibility of creating a NAMs biobank, potentially enabling a greater number of researchers to access these models. 

Funding research or funding change?

I was quite surprised at the direction the conversation took and the fact that there were so many ‘infrastructure’ type suggestions. We know we are a very small funder in the research landscape and so it makes sense to me that we can add the most value by supporting work facilitating and improving access to non-animal methods for researchers. This would however be a slight shift from directly funding lab work, and I was interested to hear scientists pushing us in this direction.  

Food for thought

We went away with plenty of food for thought and will have some interesting conversations to come for sure at our next Board of Trustees this week! Watch this space…