How Paul Allen's Frontiers Group Is Funding Research on Human Immunity

When Paul Allen, whose role as co-founder of Microsoft made him a billionaire, began to direct his energies and wealth to philanthropy as far back as the 1980s, his focus was narrow—mainly concerned with his home community of Seattle, and with the science of the human brain. Over the years, his philanthropy grew in breadth, daring and dollars. In particular, he expanded his science philanthropy, which included the establishment of the Allen Institute for Cell Science.

When Allen succumbed to cancer in 2018 at the age of 65, it was clear the philanthropic engine he created would continue, but would it follow the path he set, supporting fundamental science and emerging ideas that might lead in time to whole new fields of knowledge? Fortunately, Allen’s philanthropic impulses in science live on, most recently in an announcement from the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group.

Frontiers recently made public the latest 10 awardees out of its Distinguished Investigator program, which Allen launched in 2010 to support early-stage research in biology and medicine—research that might not otherwise find support from public agencies or other philanthropies. The Distinguished Investigator program is Frontiers’ primary grantmaking avenue. The awards provide $1.5 million over three years, for a total of $6 million in the current round. Including the new awardees, Frontiers has funded 92 Distinguished Investigators so far. The most recent round of grantees are all working on the human immune system, still a poorly understood realm.

Over the past year, readers have probably encountered the word “immunity” with more frequency and apprehension than they’d like. Of course, headline-hogging though COVID-19 may justifiably be, the immune system is central to health and is about a lot more than any single disease. And while the current crop of investigator awards were not made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the global health emergency certainly shined a spotlight on “all that we don’t know about metabolism,” said Kathy Richmond, senior director at the Frontiers Group.

The grantee investigators, working in four teams of two or three lead investigators per award, are looking into questions of basic biology, health, disease and technological development to enable new forms of research. They’re all focused on important questions about the human immune system—more specifically, how the immune system and human metabolism work together to keep us kicking.

Richmond told Inside Philanthropy that the human immune system had been under increasing notice from the grantmaking team. “It’s been fascinating to see this topic come up on our radar for the last couple of years,” she said. “It’s about understanding how systems interact in the body—not just what’s going on in one cell or tissue or organ, but how they’re all connected and work together.”

What is known is that multiple interlocking systems in the body can be thrown out of balance by illness or other factors, leading to serious consequences for health, Richmond said.

The grantee researchers will be looking, for example, at the field of immunometabolism—how nutrition and metabolism influences immune system activity, and how immune cells affect metabolism. Understanding these processes could enable the development of new therapies for several diseases, including cancer, diabetes and heart disease, according to the Frontiers Group’s grants announcement.

In addition to the Frontiers Group, several Allen-related business and funding entities have maintained their founder’s focus on scientific research and solutions. Vulcan Inc., the company Paul and his sister Jody Allen established in 1986 as an umbrella for his businesses, investments and philanthropy, continues to study climate change, technology, the oceans and conservation. The Allen Institute conducts important brain and cell science, among other subjects—one study by institute researchers recently published in the journal Nature demonstrated new approaches to understanding how the brain processes visual information.

It’s safe to say that even after his death, Allen’s legacy and vision for addressing global and scientific problems has in fact lived on.