A recent graduate “upcycled” his gown into personal protective equipment for healthcare workers (and inspired others to do the same), researchers found an antibody from a 2003 SARS patient that could be effective against the new coronavirus, and a team of MIT economists crunched the historical numbers and came up with some encouraging results on vaccine development. Read on for more promising news in the fight against COVID-19.

More than 35,000 nonprofits have investment funds, with $800 billion in assets managed. The funds generate an average return – net of administrative expenses – of 5.3 percent, according to The Risk, Reward, and Asset Allocation of Nonprofit Endowment Funds, a research paper from Andrew W. Lo and Egor Matveyev of the MIT Sloan School of Management and Stefan Zeume of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Vaccines are more likely to get through clinical trials than any other type of drug — but have been given relatively little pharmaceutical industry support during the last two decades, according to a new study by MIT scholars.

Over a two-decade span from January 2000 to January 2020, private-sector vaccine-development efforts succeeded in bringing a drug to market 39.6 percent of the time, the researchers found. By contrast, programs to develop anti-infective therapeutics — medicines that lessen the severity of illness, including antibiotics — succeeded 16.3 percent of the time.

“The probability of success for vaccines is reliably higher than for any other drug development area,” says MIT economist Andrew Lo, co-author of a new paper detailing the study.

Yet, little is known about which NPOs have endowment funds and how they invest. A new paper by MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. Andrew W. Lo and Visiting Prof. Egor Matveyev sheds light on the “black box of endowments,” revealing that bigger funds and NPOs with stricter governance generate higher returns.

In the past two months alone, Wall Street investors have injected billions into a handful of biotech companies in the early stages of producing vaccines or drugs to fight the new coronavirus . Some of these companies are looking for promising treatments, experts say, but others are likely to start looking for a cure. The result: an investment bubble in coronaviruses that is already approaching nearly $ 200 billion in market value.

In the past two months alone, Wall Street investors have pumped billions into a handful of biotech companies in the early stages of producing vaccines or drugs to combat the novel coronavirus. Some of these companies are pursuing promising treatments, experts say, but others are likely to strike out on finding a cure. The result: a coronavirus investment bubble that's already approaching nearly $200 billion in stock market value.

"If you look at the most significant diseases outside of Covid-19, like MERS, SARS, Ebola, and Zika, among those diseases, there's been a total of only 45 nonvaccine programs initiated over the last two decades for them,” [Prof. Andrew] Lo said in the statement. “And there's been only one vaccine approved, for Ebola, in December 2019. That's worrisome, because we know for a fact that these diseases are real threats, and yet there's been relatively little attention paid to them.”

Vaccines are more likely to get through clinical trials than any other type of drug — but have been given relatively little pharmaceutical industry support during the last two decades, according to a new study by MIT scholars.

Over a two-decade span from January 2000 to January 2020, private-sector vaccine-development efforts succeeded in bringing a drug to market 39.6 percent of the time, the researchers found. By contrast, programs to develop anti-infective therapeutics — medicines that lessen the severity of illness, including antibiotics — succeeded 16.3 percent of the time.

“The probability of success for vaccines is reliably higher than for any other drug development area,” says MIT economist Andrew Lo, co-author of a new paper detailing the study.

Vaccines are more likely to get through clinical trials than other types of drugs, but vaccine development for some of the world’s most dangerous diseases has lagged in recent decades, which may present challenges for the pursuit of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new MIT study.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have published a pair of studies in a COVID-19 special issue of the Harvard Data Science Review, freely available via open access, describing new methods for accelerating drug approvals during pandemics and for providing more accurate measures of the probabilities of success for clinical trials of vaccines and other anti-infective therapies.

"Randomized clinical trials - where patients are assigned randomly to two groups, one receiving a new treatment and the other receiving a placebo or reference treatment - are the gold standard for determining the safety and effectiveness of a treatment," says Andrew Lo, Ph.D., the study's senior author and the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "Only when the treatment group shows significant improvement over the control group, will regulators approve the therapy." He adds, "the current process is designed to protect the public by minimizing the chances of "false positives" (approving ineffective and unsafe therapies), and by and large, it's been very successful."

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have published a pair of studies in a COVID-19 special issue of the Harvard Data Science Review, freely available via open access, describing new methods for accelerating drug approvals during pandemics and for providing more accurate measures of the probabilities of success for clinical trials of vaccines and other anti-infective therapies.

A study emerging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and published in the Harvard Data Science Review has detailed strategies for accelerating the regular pace of regulatory approvals in order to create a faster access route to essential treatments and prophylactics during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have published a pair of studies in a COVID-19 special issue of the Harvard Data Science Review, freely available via open access, describing new methods for accelerating drug approvals during pandemics and for providing more accurate measures of the probabilities of success for clinical trials of vaccines and other anti-infective therapies.

How important is it for endowments to have a chief investment officer? Not very, according to new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Illinois.

The study, which examined characteristics linked to higher returns at nonprofit endowment funds, found no “systematic evidence” that funds with dedicated CIOs perform any better than endowments without dedicated CIOs. Furthermore, compensation for CIOs was found unrelated to returns, according to authors Andrew Lo and Egor Matveyev of MIT and Stefan Zeume, a business school professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For Jim Simons, history is repeating itself, at least when it comes to meltdowns in the quant fund world. Computer models at Renaissance Technologies, the firm founded by the mathematician and former codebreaker, misfired when volatility surged this year, contributing to a first-quarter loss at its largest hedge fund. The beta models, which help determine portfolio exposure at funds for outside investors, “in recent volatile markets have not performed as expected,” Renaissance said in a March 30 filing.