In a bid to overcome some of the commercial challenges faced by expensive new gene therapies, Quantile Health has raised $6 million for a financial platform that’s designed to spread out costs and widen access.

The company was co-founded by MIT professor Andrew Lo, whose ideas formed the intellectual foundation for the company BridgeBio, as part of his quest to change how drug development is financed.

Professor Andrew Lo proposed a $30bn cancer "megafund" a decade ago to combine drug testing projects to diversify risk. The idea had already inspired smaller-scale applications at companies such as BridgeBio and Roivant, he said. "If we can change the incentives and reduce risk, the increased reward will bring more money," Lo said.

New MIT research forecasts the effect of various two-dose vaccine allocation strategies on the cumulative number of infections and deaths in the U.S.—quantifying the impact of prioritizing first versus second doses. The forecasts suggest that allocating more than 50% of available doses to individuals who have not received their first dose can significantly increase the number of lives saved and significantly reduce the number of COVID-19 infections.

The typical life cycle of a drug from the laboratory to the clinic and, finally, to patients is long and fraught with obstacles. There is a significant bottleneck — known as the Valley of Death — when lack of funding prevents ideas from moving from the university into the market.

Andrew W. Lo is an economist by training and trade. While studying the drug discovery cycle for personal reasons, he was baffled by the concept of the Valley of Death. From the perspective of an economist, as he explains, “I always assumed that if there’s a medical need and if there’s a good rate of return for treating it, the money will flow. So, if there’s a bottleneck, it must mean that there just aren’t enough good opportunities.”

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

"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.