Our Funding Criteria

Our team funds areas of biomedical research we believe are important, neglected, and tractable, following Coefficient Giving’s cause selection criteria.

For our purposes, “neglected” often means that a relatively small amount of public and private funding is spent on the problem relative to its disability-adjusted life year (DALY) burden; see an example of how we applied this to vaccine funding here. This means we are particularly interested in potentially high-impact projects overlooked by other funders.

Projects we fund

Our grantmaking is guided primarily by our cause selection criteria rather than specific factors such as disease groups, product categories, or development phases. As a result, we have made grants and investments in very disparate fields such as computational protein design, new tools for clean water, late-stage malaria vaccine trials, and market shaping to expand access for sickle cell disease diagnostics and treatments.

These grants might seem unrelated in terms of the health problems addressed and the tools employed, but we believe they share a common thread in that they are exceptional opportunities for cost-effective funding.

The Science and Global Health R&D fund page provides further explanation of our approach and current work in the space. For examples of specific projects we fund, here are some highlights from our portfolio.

Projects we’re unlikely to fund

There are many important areas that we are unlikely to fund, either because our program staff lack the requisite expertise, or because we think the area doesn’t score as well in our cause selection criteria (e.g. the area receives a high amount of funding relative to its health burden).

Areas we are less likely to fund in the near future include, but are not limited to: cancer, diabetes, reproductive medicine, rare diseases, pain, mental health, most work on HIV/AIDS, and other issues prevalent in rich countries but less so in poorer ones. While these areas are important, we have limited resources and mostly focus elsewhere.

Where to submit your proposal

Most of the time, we proactively reach out to potential grantees to shape funding proposals together, but we also read unsolicited proposals. If you want to submit an idea to us, you can send an email to science@coefficientgiving.org with a short description of an existing proposal you have submitted to another funder, or a new 1-2 page proposal with a rough budget outline and an estimated timeline. We receive a large volume of inquiries, so we will only be able to respond to those that may be a good fit for our programmatic goals. Historically, we ended up funding about 1-2% of the unsolicited proposals we received. For more information on what happens next in our internal decision-making process, see here.