[Narrator] This is a story of how a tech entrepreneur
and an economist rapidly funded some of the most
innovative solutions to fight COVID-19.
One even helped make the NBA bubble possible.
[Tyler] I don't even remember all the back and forth.
It was so quick, within an hour, we decided to do it.
[Narrator] They created Fast Grants.
A platform that funded COVID science
within days, instead of months.
[Patrick] Giving the right $10,000 to the most deserving person,
that can actually change the world.
[Narrator] They stripped away all the traditional red tape
and revolutionized the way scientific funding can look.
[Tyler] I'm a guy in his pajamas with a checkbook.
Do you want the money, yes or no?
They always say yes.
[Narrator] Meet Patrick Collison.
His company Stripe, processes our daily purchases
on millions of online stores.
He has a dog named Luna, who just stole our camera gear,
and he's also trying to find the answer
to a very hard question.
[Patrick] Why does science progress at the rate that it does
and what can we do to make it advance more quickly?
And so I called my friend Tyler.
[Tyler] One of the key themes of my research for many years
has been that progress is slowing down
and we are less innovative than we used to be.
But here was the case where urgency really mattered.
The COVID-19 pandemic,
with thousands of people dying every day,
every day matters.
And the ideas and technologies that could help
have been lacking in speedy funding.
[Narrator] Scientists can have brilliant ideas
but it typically takes almost a year
for those ideas to get funding.
[Patrick] There is no scientific grant-making agency or body
designed to make decisions in hours
or a small number of days.
And so when we saw an opportunity
to accelerate scientific research,
we decided to create Fast Grants.
[Researcher] Hi, this is the Martineau lab,
and we're grateful to have a Fast Grant
to be doing COVID-19 research.
[Patrick] The goal of Fast Grants
was and is to enable scientific research
relevant to the COVID pandemic,
to get underway and to be pursued as rapidly as possible.
[Tyler] If you want to send in a grant proposal to the NIH,
run by our government,
your proposal has to meet a particular kind of font size,
it has to fit a narrow series of requirements.
In general, just preparing grant requests
can take many months.
For Fast Grants,
most researchers can fill out the whole form within an hour.
That is speed.
[Patrick] Fast Grants is the antithesis of big science.
It's not a billion dollars to one giant centralized efforts.
It's smaller grants placed as expediently as possible
to make the next significant discovery.
[Narrator] After launching in April of 2020,
they gave out over 200 grants in just seven months.
That's almost a grant per day.
[Researcher 2] We recently received Fast Grants support
to develop vaccine candidates.
[Researcher 3] We have developed a nasal spray,
as well as a pill that you can swallow to combat COVID.
[Narrator] And some of these grants
would go on to influence the entire country.
[Newcaster] A breakthrough development in the fight against COVID-19.
[Tyler] The most concrete breakthrough we had
is the spit test, called SalivaDirect.
[Newcaster] A saliva-based COVID test
developed by researchers at Yale.
[Tyler] And it's their test that helped make the NBA bubble work.
The spit test used to be complicated
and time consuming and costly.
They figured out a way to do it that is quicker
and much cheaper and this is now being used
in laboratories all across America.
[Andy] This is one of the most significant advances
since we've been living with Coronavirus.
[Patrick] We almost didn't do Fast Grants
because we thought it was so obvious
that assuredly someone else is already doing it
or is soon going to do it themselves.
[Narrator] The science they funded
furthered the world's understanding of COVID-19.
Everything from vaccines, immunology,
genetic testing, even nanotechnology.
But they also had another motive behind all this research.
[Patrick] COVID-19 is not gonna be our last pandemic.
That 19 suffix is important for a reason.
[Tyler] So we want Fast Grants to be situating us
for the next pandemic.
So we will all be better prepared to fight that battle too.
[Patrick] We're not at the best science we could have.
I hope we see that Fast Grants is just a small little wiggle
in a much larger trajectory of subsequent improvement.
[Tyler] What we need to do now
is to start trying to find out just how fast we can be.
[Narrator] Thanks for watching.
Visit standtogether.org, to learn more
about the innovators tackling
our country's biggest challenges.