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Replies to post #137466 on Biotech Values
MIT financial wiz calls for $30B megafund to back next-gen cancer drugs
October 1, 2012 | By John Carroll
Read more: MIT financial wiz calls for $30B megafund to back next-gen cancer drugs - FierceBiotech http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/mit-financial-wiz-calls-30b-megafund-back-next-gen-cancer-drugs/2012-10-01#ixzz28IGz9ufq
MIT's influential Andrew W. Lo is determined to recruit some of the world's biggest investors for a $30 billion megafund that can shift R&D work on early-stage cancer drugs into overdrive...
...This new fund, [Lo] he adds, could back 150 experimental drugs at any given time...
MIT economist pitches cancer megafund
By Beth Healy
[Boston] GLOBE STAFF OCTOBER 01, 2012
Andrew W. Lo, the MIT finance professor and hedge fund manager, wants to bring Wall Street-style financial engineering to a crucial social need: curing cancer...
Lo runs an investment firm in Cambridge called AlphaSimplex Group, with $3 billion in assets...
... Lo is widely recognized, including by Time, for his Darwinian view of the markets, in which he applies evolutionary and neurobiological models to risk and finance. He is director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering.
... Lo lost his mother last year to lung cancer. He, like many people, also has watched friends and colleagues struggle with the disease in its various forms.
As an economist, he said, “I felt pretty helpless.’’
So he decided to focus on an area where he could have an impact: funding sources for cancer research.
In his Nature Biotechnology paper, Lo calls the current business model for drug research and development flawed, noting that the number of drug applications per dollar of spending is declining, and pharmaceutical stocks as a group have fared poorly over the past decade.
Under Lo’s proposal, the oncology fund could pour money into more speculative, early-stage research in exchange for a percentage of future royalties or proceeds from sales of intellectual property. A successful cancer drug can generate $2 billion a year in revenue, he said...
...Lo is planning a conference next year to which he will invite scientists, investment managers, venture capitalists, and large institutional investors to discuss the practical details of the megafund in greather depth....
