International funder shown to punch above its weight in scientific originality, cross-border collaboration, and downstream innovation

STRASBOURG, France, 27 August 2026 — A comprehensive independent evaluation of the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP), carried out by Prognos and Digital Science, has found that the organization plays an important role in advancing conceptually novel, high-risk research that reshapes scientific fields and feeds innovation systems around the world — outcomes that would be difficult to achieve through national or bilateral funding alone.

The 2025 Grand Review of the HFSP, examined the program's scientific and societal footprint across decades of funded research. It found that work supported by HFSP is prominently represented by conceptually novel research, often high-risk and built on new ideas that challenge and reframe established scientific paradigms rather than simply extending them. The report and supplemental material are available at www.hfsp.org.

"These findings confirm what many in the international research community have long observed: HFSP fills a critical funding gap that no single country or conventional funding body can address," said Pavel Kabat, HFSP Secretary General. "By supporting research that is geographically distributed, disciplinarily unconventional, or simply too risky for standard peer-review processes, HFSP enables discoveries that might otherwise never happen”.

A distinct niche in the global science funding landscape
The evaluation highlights that HFSP supports research that cannot easily be funded at national or international levels — particularly projects involving geographically distant partners, unconventional combinations of disciplines, or high conceptual risk. This niche positions HFSP as a catalyst for work at the interfaces of biology with physics, chemistry, engineering, and technology, where the program has played an especially important role in the emergence and redirection of entire research areas.
Case studies conducted by Digital Science as part of the Grand Review illustrate how this distinctive approach has enabled new scientific directions and discoveries.

Outstanding scientific and citation impact
Publications acknowledging HFSP support achieve field-normalized citation impacts well above global averages, the review found, underscoring the disproportionate influence of HFSP-funded work relative to its funding volume. The review analyzed 15,945 HFSP-supported publications, published between 2008 and 2023, the most recent half of the Program’s lifetime with reliable data available. More than one-third ranked among the global Top 10% of publications by field-normalized citation impact, with particularly strong performance across Biological Sciences, Biomedical and Clinical Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Psychology, Engineering, Physical Sciences, and Information and Computing Sciences.
Topic and concept analyses indicate that work supported by HFSP is prominently represented by conceptually novel research, often high risk and new ideas. In this way HFSP funded projects are challenging and reframing established scientific paradigms acting as a catalyst for the development of new research areas. This is one of the most distinguishing features of HFSP compared to other funders.

A surprising bridge to groundbreaking innovations
In granting HFSP funding to projects, no a priori indications are required as to expected innovative, economic or societal impacts and outcomes of the research to be undertaken; HFSP supported basic science is primarily driven by scientific curiosity. Strikingly, the evaluation found that approximately 17% of HFSP-acknowledged publications are cited in patents — an unusually high proportion for exploratory basic research. These citations span thousands of patent families and organizations across more than 50 countries, reflecting applications across biomedicine, materials science, and biotechnology, among other sectors.
In a global benchmark comparing basic-science-classified publications across major international funders, HFSP recorded the highest rate of patent citation among all organizations assessed at 22.2% — exceeding comparable funding bodies.

Lasting international partnerships
The review also documents a sustained increase in international collaboration associated with HFSP funding, effects that often persist long after a grant period ends. Many collaborations initiated through HFSP evolve into long-term scientific partnerships, reinforcing global scientific networks well beyond the life of any individual project.

Why it matters
Taken together, the findings position HFSP as a distinctive and influential actor in the global research funding ecosystem — one whose value lies not in short-term deliverables but in seeding the foundational science, tools, and international networks that downstream innovation depends on. The HFSP programs deliver exceptional scientific quality, seed long-term innovation, strengthen international collaboration, and develop scientific talent in ways that national programs alone cannot achieve. For member states, HFSP provides both scientific returns and value added in various ways, reinforcing its continued relevance in an increasingly complex and competitive global research landscape.

####

HFSPO was established by the G7 countries at the initiative of former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan at the 1987 Venice Summit. Open to scientists of every nation, HFSPO is supported by 17 Members, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the European Commission. The mission of HFSPO is to foster bold, basic, frontier research in the life sciences and interdisciplinary collaborations around the world. Since 1990, more than 9,000 researchers from more than 70 countries have been supported. Of these, in the past 36 years, 31 HFSP awardees have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.