When the MIT economist Andrew Lo came up with the concept of the hub-and-spoke model for the drug industry, it was to reduce the financial risk of developing drugs for rare forms of cancer.

VIDEO: Covid-19 may be a public health crisis, but has had real impacts on the economy. MIT’s Andrew Lo discusses what’s happened and why history suggests a financial boom may be in the future.

Biotechnologies born in the labs of MIT have been given priority review more often than other, similar life sciences innovations, according to a new study published in Nature Biotechnology.

When Covid-19 hit, a lot of bullish investors looked for lessons in the previous outbreak. But the comparisons may be misleading.

MIT has debuted a new platform designed to help the enterprise decide how to invest in cybersecurity.

By securely aggregating sensitive data from cyber-attacks, the SCRAM platform from MIT CSAIL can quantify an organization’s level of security and suggest what to prioritize.

We explore the science, scalability, and (of course) economics surrounding the global vaccine race. Guests include the chief medical officer of the first U.S. firm to go to Phase 3 trials with a vaccine candidate; a former F.D.A. commissioner who’s been warning of a pandemic for years; and an economist who thinks Covid-19 may finally change how diseases are cured.

Stock markets love to take everyone by surprise, and less than a year from now a very big surprise will have played out: Stocks will be a lot higher by June as the economy moves into overheat mode. How do we get from the current grim state of affairs to this very different world? Two steps.

As donations to nonprofits have decreased during the Covid-19 pandemic, those with endowments are turning to these funds to help them survive the crisis. But not all endowments are created equal. Factors such as size, management, and investment allocation significantly affect how much revenue endowments generate.

How much should it cost the average American to get a COVID-19 vaccine shot in the arm? Although a vaccine is months away, if not longer, billions of tax dollars are spent to rapidly research, develop, manufacture and distribute several candidates. The federal government promised to make a vaccine free for people of low income. How many taxpayer dollars would enable everyone to get it without paying?

THE STOCK MARKET appears strangely indifferent to Covid-19 these days, but that wasn’t true in March, as the scale and breadth of the crisis hit home. By one measure, it was the most volatile month in stock market history; on March 16, the Dow Jones average fell almost 13 percent, its biggest one-day decline since 1987. To some, the vertigo-inducing episode also exposed a weakness of quantitative (or quant) trading firms, which rely on mathematical models, including artificial intelligence, to make trading decisions.

“The parallels between video games and day trading is becoming closer and closer,” says Andrew Lo, a finance professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “For many gamers, particularly the younger ones who are not used to trading and don't fully understand the impact of significant losses and gains on their psychophysiology, it could have some significant adverse consequences.”

One thing we’ve learned from the Covid-19 crisis is that there can be a conflict between resilience and optimisation. If, for example, the NHS had had lots of spare beds, ventilators and PPE equipment before the pandemic began it would have been more resilient and better able to cope with the crisis. But this would at the time have appeared sub-optimal, as these resources would have been wasted for months.

It seems that the closest to developing a vaccine for Covid-19 is the American Moderna, whose shares have risen this year by 178 percent. Returns on other companies' shares are even four-digit.