How Houston’s nonprofit funds early research that leads to breakthroughs like the COVID vaccine – Houston Chronicle

Jason McLellan was confident he was on his way to creating the first vaccine for human metapneumovirus, a respiratory disease that is common among children and the elderly, and could be dangerous to those with weakened immune systems. One small problem: He had some data, but likely not enough to grab the attention of federal funders like the National Institutes of Health.

This phenomenon is a Catch 22 researchers are all too familiar with -- Its difficult to get funding without data, but working unfunded makes it difficult to collect data.

Enter the Welch Foundation. In 2019, McLellan, while at the University of Texas, received $80,000 per year for three years from the Houston charity to fund his research. That funding went to research by McClellan and his colleagues that proved a vaccine technology used in the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines.

For close to 70 years, the Welch Foundation has taken chances on scientists like McLellan, funding research at its earliest stages based on one major criterion: its a good idea. Since its founding in 1954, the foundation has provided some $1.1 billion in seed money for basic research that has led to breakthroughs in medicine, vaccines, and materials.

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But whether the research ever results in a commercial product has no bearing on the projects that the Welch Foundation funds, said Adam Kuspa, the charitys president. The only goal is to allow scientists in chemistry and related fields to pursue their own interests, with no expectations of where it might lead.

Its funding to allow basic science researchers in chemistry and related fields to follow their curiosity, Kuspa said, with no thought that there has to be a product in the end.

McLellans case, however, shows the many directions in which basic research can lead. In addition to its contribution to COVID vaccines, the research yielded a metapneumovirus vaccine that has been licensed by a pharmaceutical company and will enter clinical trials later this year. Human metapneumovirus affects more than 11 million people a year, according to a 2018 study.

Ultimately, taking on earlier stage research often means as many failures as successes, Kuspa said. But even failures advance knowledge perhaps more so than success and the successes, as McLellans vaccine work shows, can change the world for the good.

His story is an object lesson in why you fund basic research, Kuspa said.

The Welch Foundation was created when federal funding for research was a novel idea. One of the first major pushes by the federal government to fund the sciences came in 1940s, with efforts such as MITs Radiation Laboratory or Rad Lab, which was a private-public partnership that resulted in the creation of various radar systems used in World War II. It ultimately inspired the creation of the National Science Foundation, a government agency that supports fundamental research and education in science and engineering, in 1950. This showed the possibilities of funding research.

The foundation was created by the estate of Robert Welch in the 1950s. Welch came to Houston from South Carolina when he was 14 years old with almost no money in his pocket. He was quickly able to find a job at a local drugstore in Houston and then eventually worked as a bookkeeper and salesman, for the Bute Company, a paint firm.

It was the late 1800s, not long before the Spindletop gusher launched the first Texas oil boom. He would listen to businessmen come into the shop and talk about the oil and gas industry, and soon began buying and selling land and mineral rights for oil and gas development, earning his fortune.

He wanted to use his wealth to do good, and first considered a foundation to fund cancer research. But already coming out were the first chemotherapies, which he thought might cure cancer in a decade or two. Its unclear why Welch left his fortune to advance chemical research, but before he died in 1952, he created a trust of $25 million now valued at about $1 billion to support the foundation, which was formed in 1954.

The foundation usually has 300 grants going at a time, and provides researchers up to $100,000 a year for three years. This funding allows chemists to hire researchers, maintain their labs, buy chemical supplies, travel and cover any other expenses, Kuspa said.

In 2001, the Welch Foundation funded James Tour, a chemistry professor at Rice University, who was experimenting with nanotechnology, which manipulates materials at the molecular level to make functioning machines. He was developing nano cars, devices with four wheels an axles, but so tiny that 50,000 of them could be parked across the diameter of a human hair.

It was purely intellectual curiosity, Tour said. We didnt know what they would end up being good for.

But that curiosity ended up paying off. Throughout the 2000s Tour continued his research. He adapted the technology he created to build his nano cars to create nano machines that drill into cancerous cells and super bacteria bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. Welch Foundation funded research for the technology in 2019.

The nano machines proved successful in animal trials. Tour is now applying to the FDA to begin clinical trials.

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Often times, the foundation is among the first to back research projects. Livia Schiavinato Eberlin, an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine, is developing a handheld device called the MasSpec Pen to tell surgeons whether issue has cancerous cells while they operate.

Doctors can easily tell where cancerous cells are concentrated, but, closer to the margins of tissue, it's difficult to determine where to stop cutting, Eberlin said. They dont want to risk leaving cancerous cells in the patient, but they also want to preserve as much normal tissue as possible.

Welch funded the research for the chemistry that makes the device work. The pen uses solvents to chemically extract molecule samples from living tissue. Once she had research understanding how the device could work, she was able to get funding to create prototype from the National Institutes of Health and then The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, a state agency that funds cancer research. Additional funders came on recently.

The device is in pilot studies, which precede FDA clinical trials. It has been tested by more than 20 surgeons at MD Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine, and Eberlin estimates it could win FDA approval within 5 years.

Having a continuous source of stable funding makes a huge difference, Eberlin said, especially for early career investigators like me.

Basic research is a matter of economic and international security, said Yousif Shamoo, former vice provost for Research at Rice University.

Historically, the United States has led the world in investing in research and development, but other countries are challenging that lead. U.S. investment in research and development, as a percentage of the economic output, has remained stagnant for nearly half a century, while China has increased research funding at about 2 percent a year, relative to its economy, according to a 2020 report from Rice Universitys Baker Institute and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

China is on track to surpass the United States in total research and development spending by 2030, according to a 2020 report from the National Science Board.

Investing in basic research is how the great nations become great, Shamoo said. They have this ability to see into the future by investing in things that 20 or 30 years from now produce big wins and really disruptive technologies that change everybody's lives.

Early funding also can help disruptive technologies come to fruition faster. Eberlins MasSpec Pen was just an idea in 2016, but is now undergoing multiple trials supersonic speed for academia, she said. Without early funding from the Welch foundation, she doesnt think her device would be so far along.

Without would have been a lot more difficult time consuming, stressful, Eberlin said, and we probably would have wouldn't have accomplished what we did in just a few years.

becca.carballo@chron.com

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How Houston's nonprofit funds early research that leads to breakthroughs like the COVID vaccine - Houston Chronicle