A $70m commitment from the Snow family will advance medicine

This year’s Snow Fellows, all cancer experts, will become part of the medical research ecosystem the philanthropists aim to create.

Tom Snow, chair of the Snow Medical Research Foundation and his father, Terry Snow, its founder. Supplied.

One of Australia’s major philanthropic donors to medical research has again boosted its funding commitment, deciding again to award three $8m fellowships this year instead of two.

This year’s recipients of the Snow Medical Research Foundation’s eight-year fellowships are three cancer researchers – the Garvan Institute of Medical Research’s Marina Pajic, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre’s Melanie Eckersley Maslin and the University of Melbourne’s Shom Goel, who is also a consultant oncologist at Peter Mac.

It is the second year in a row that the Snow Medical Research Foundation has given three fellowships, rather than two and takes its long-term commitment to $70m, a $20m jump on the original plan.

The intention of the foundation, set up last year, had been to fund two researchers per year, nominated and supported by their institutions, but chair Tom Snow said the selection panel found itself spoiled for choice. “There were three amazing people last year, three amazing people this year, and we couldn’t draw a line between them,” Mr Snow said. “So we decided to do more than we committed to.”

The Snow family’s philanthropic investment arm in medical research has also invested $5.5m in Covid-19 research and is committed to awarding two more fellowships next year.

Mr Snow and his mother Ginette sit on the selection panel for the fellowships, along with former director of The Walter and Elizabeth Hall Institute, Suzanne Cory, Garvan executive director Chris Goodnow, Charles Perkins Centre academic director Stephen Simpson and ARC Centre of ­Excellence for Electromaterials Science executive research director Gordon Wallace.

A former Rhodes Scholar, Mr Snow worked in the US before ­returning to work in the family business run by his father, Canberra airport owner and businessman Terry Snow, before striking out on his own.

It is his father’s style that he wants to replicate in the Snow fellowships. “One of the reasons our business is so successful is because we’ve encouraged excellence and risk-taking and boldness, and we’re trying to transplant that work that Terry’s done and that culture into the scientific community,” he said.

Part of that culture is being willing to take calculated risks, and if they do not bring success, to try something different. “Terry is a visionary in how he works,” Mr Snow said of his father. “He takes on enormous risks and it’s paid off tremendously, but he has made some mistakes along the way, and learning from those mistakes has been a key to his success.”

Terry Snow, the founder of Snow Medical, said he was “particularly pleased” that this year’s fellows had “demonstrated a strong commitment to generous leadership; mentoring other ­scientists in their teams, as well as their institutions, and collab­orators”.

This element of the fellowships set them apart from funding awarded on solely on the basis of scientific excellence, Tom Snow said: “It’s not just about the amazing work that’ll come out of these labs and their teams … I hope that some of them will go on to lead institutions maybe in Australia, but maybe around the world – show real scientific leadership as well.”

The generous funding and longevity of the fellowships is intended to lift promising scientists out of the cycle of applying for relatively short-term funding via organisations such as the Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council, where success rates are typically 10-20 per cent.

The foundation ultimately hopes to have 16 fellows operating at any one time.

“If each fellow has between six to eight employees, we’re going to have 100 staff that we’re supporting, effectively a ‘virtual’ institution,” Tom Snow said.