Twenty-five years of watching good questions go unfunded

Mike and Julie Matthews spent twenty-five years founding and running a drug development company. It was a successful business, and it taught them a great deal about how medicines are made, tested, regulated and paid for.

It also taught them which questions get answered. Funding follows a return, whether that return is commercial or academic. A new medicine for a common condition attracts investment. A better way of managing an existing medicine's side effects does not. A test for a condition affecting a few thousand people rarely clears a commercial hurdle, however much difference it would make to those few thousand people.

Having sold most of the company, they were in a position to do something about it. Duet is the result: a small UK charity that funds under-served work, and backs it with the experience, expertise and network of scientific and medical contacts built over a career.

What "under-served" means to us

We use the word carefully. A project is under-served when it would help people, when it can realistically be done, and when it is unlikely to be funded elsewhere. Usually that is because it is too small, too practical, or too unprofitable to interest anyone else.

What we are not trying to be

We are not trying to replace research councils or large medical charities, and we are not trying to grow into one. We are trying to be useful: quick to decide, honest when the answer is no, and genuinely helpful when the answer is yes.