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.

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.

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.

"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.”

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.

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.

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.

As gene-based vaccines are being designed and tested at unprecedented speeds to fight COVID-19, scientists wonder if this will be the technology’s make-or-break moment.

Watch the MIT Industrial Liaison Program with professors Yossi Sheffi, Alex Pentland, and Andrew Lo for a special webinar highlighting the impacts of COVID-19 on business.

Topics include:
* What should firms be doing with their supply chain now?
* Who is most at risk in your organization? What should firms be doing to prevent catastrophic spread of the virus inside their organizations?
* What do executives need to be watching now in financial markets?

Andrew W. Lo's presentation slides available HERE

See overview and agenda on the MIT ILP website

LAFAYETTE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Journal Of Investment Management (JOIM) and New Frontier Advisors LLC today announced the winners of the 2019 Harry M. Markowitz Award. The winners are finalized by a Special Selection Panel comprised of Nobel Prize Laureates.

The Markowitz Award is sponsored jointly by JOIM and New Frontier Advisors and recognizes the seminal and transcendent impact of Dr. Markowitz’s work as a financial economist and mathematician on both theoretical finance and the practice of asset management. The award was established to honor his legacy and to support future research and innovation in practical asset management. Candidates for the annual award are chosen from among papers published in JOIM in a calendar year. An honorarium of $10,000 is bestowed for the winning paper. Two additional finalist papers receive a Special Distinction Award along with a $5,000 honorarium.

2019 Markowitz Award Winners

This year’s top recognition was awarded to “Funding Long Shots,” by John Hull, Professor of Derivatives and Risk Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Andrew W. Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Roger M. Stein, Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

In this episode of Bold Voices, John Doyle, Global Healthcare Innovation Lead, sat down with Dr. Andrew Lo, Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, to discuss innovative solutions that better address affordability and increase patient access to breakthrough medicines.

“In this country, we've used the inflammatory term ‘death panels' to hamper, frankly, the discussion that needs to happen with regard to drug pricing,” says Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at MIT Sloan School of Management.