Can we spot scientific breakthroughs before they happen?

How do funding decisions shape the direction of biomedical research? Can we spot transformative discoveries years before they are recognised by prizes, policies, or the wider community? And what can patterns of scientific communication tell us about how breakthroughs actually emerge?

In a new spotLights episode, preLighter Jonathan Townson speaks with Kris Willis, founder of the newly launched Woodley Park Institute, to explore these questions through the lens of two ambitious recent preprints analysing funding, publications, and scientific impact at scale.

Drawing on her experience as a systems biologist, former NIH-funded investigator, and NIH programme director, Kris discusses the motivation behind the work: using the vast amounts of data generated by funding and publishing systems to better understand how science progresses as a whole. One preprint examines long-term trends in NIH funding opportunities, grant applications, and resulting publications, revealing a gradual but consistent shift toward more clinical and translational research. The other takes on a bold challenge: whether it is possible to predict transformative biomedical breakthroughs well before they are formally recognised.

The conversation delves into how co‑citation networks and field-normalised metrics can identify signals of future impact – sometimes decades in advance – and why these signals do not always align with traditional markers of success such as prizes or raw citation counts. Along the way, the discussion touches on important questions for early‑career researchers, funders, and policymakers: how to navigate an ever-expanding literature, how to balance portfolios between fundamental and applied research, and how data can be used to challenge, rather than reinforce, existing assumptions and biases.

Looking ahead, Kris also outlines future directions for this line of research, including incorporating preprints into co‑citation analyses and exploring how scientific fields converge, diverge, are born, and eventually fade. Together, these ideas point to new ways of thinking about impact, recognition, and decision-making across the research ecosystem.

To learn more, check out the preLights post prepared by Jonathan: https://prelights.biologists.com/highlights/trends-in-nih-funding-and-breakthrough-prediction-from-pubmed/

And of course, the latest spotLights episode 🎧⬇️