People in the Massachusetts biotechnology sector figured that the record-setting success of 2018 would be hard to match. So far, they're proving right.

After collectively raising $4.8 billion of venture capital last year, an all-time high, Bay State biotechs are on pace to raise less than $3 billion in 2019, according to a report published Tuesday by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, a leading industry group.

Elizabeth Steele, MassBio's vice president of programs and global affairs, said the venture climate is merely "coming back to normal" after an "insane" 2018. A total of about $3 billion would be in line with the average from 2015 to 2017.

But Andrew Lo, a biotech investor who directs the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, said he is "a bit more concerned."

The MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE) and Informa Pharma Intelligence have launched an initiative to provide timely and accurate estimates of the risks and benefits of clinical trials to the entire life sciences ecosystem.

Project ALPHA (Analytics for Life-sciences Professionals and Healthcare Advocates) aims to help investors, payers, regulators, and biopharmaceutical companies better evaluate the opportunities of biomedical research and development.

Project ALPHA’s first project will be the further development of clinical success rate metrics, based on algorithms developed by MIT researchers and published in Biostatistics in January 2018.

The MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE) and Informa Pharma Intelligence announced Project ALPHA (Analytics for Life-sciences Professionals and Healthcare Advocates), an initiative to provide timely and more accurate estimates of the risks and rewards of clinical trials to the entire biopharma ecosystem. The goal of Project ALPHA is to accelerate biomedical innovation by helping investors, regulators, payers, and biopharmaceutical companies better assess the opportunities of biomedical R&D, allowing all stakeholders to manage their investments more efficiently.

"More accurate risk metrics will eventually lead to fewer big failures, faster approval times, cost savings to the entire healthcare system and more investment capital for developing breakthrough therapies," says Andrew W. Lo, Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the LFE, "all of which means more, and better, therapies to patients sooner."

A new generation of philanthropists, whose wealth was created via entrepreneurship in technology-driven fields, has the unique opportunity to make a real difference in speeding the pace of progress in the fight against cancer. Not content with having hospital pavilions named for them or with giving large, open-ended gifts for academic research, they want to use their wealth to have a direct and visible impact on patients’ health. Research we have conducted has revealed a variety of new, highly impactful investment approaches that can help accelerate the pace of the development, approval, and commercialization of new cancer therapies. By embracing these new approaches this new generation of philanthropists has the opportunity to truly help cure cancer.

Andrew W. Lo é um autor prolífico. Professor de finanças na Sloan School of Management, do Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), ganhou reconhecimento do público, por causa de seu livro A non-random walk down Wall Street ( Uma caminhada não aleatória por Wall Street , sem edição em português), e dos profissionais, por seus artigos em periódicos importantes de finanças e economia. Lo conquistou muitos prêmios em sua carreira.

The p-value.

Statisticians use it. Non-statisticians have heard of it (likely in the context of the standard threshold of p = 0.05). While it’s not the only component of a clinical trial design, the p-value helps determine the maximum acceptable level of uncertainty associated with clinical evidence and, in a way, the fate of patient access to a new medical device.

But, is the traditional 0.05 threshold too restrictive for the patient populations willing to accept more uncertainty, depriving them of treatment options? Is it too permissive for other patient populations? Can we optimize clinical trial design by considering patients’ urgency for new therapeutic options, as well as their willingness to accept uncertainty?

Basic biomedical research may be in its most fruitful period in history: each year, with new technologies helping scientists advance our understandings of the underlying basis of human disease. At the same time, it’s increasingly difficult to undertake the process of translating promising biomedical discoveries into new drugs or diagnostics, especially those that will help relatively small numbers of people. “The problem rests not in the science,” says Whitehead Institute Founding Member Harvey Lodish, “but with the lack of funding for early-stage development.”

Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dialled in from Boston to talk about regulation, markets and the future of machine learning.

Lo pioneered the adaptive markets hypothesis, which describes markets as a complex evolutionary ecosystem, populated by different stakeholders that adapt to changes on the basis of certain behavioural traits and biases.

There's big money in biotech in the Greater Boston area. Last year, venture capital firms invested more than $3 billion in the state's biotech and pharmaceutical companies, according to the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. The amount has risen every year since 2012. Local companies have already produced revolutionary treatments for rare diseases, cancer and more. And there's promise and hope for cures and treatments still to come. Because of that, there's no shortage of capital.Biotech companies often go public even if they haven't yet put a product on the market, let alone turned a profit. MIT finance professor Andrew Lo says there's good reason for so much exuberance.

Opinion article by Andrew W. Lo and Kenneth Kosik on the potential role of California in the space of Alzheimer's Disease research.

“Nobody’s talking about this story,” Max Tokarsky said. Not exactly true, as the founder and CEO of InvestAcure is telling anyone who will listen. A former non-profit executive-turned-evangelist for the Impact Investment and Public Benefit Corporation model, Tokarsky is slated to present the keynote address at the Alzheimer's-2018 International Conference in Rome, Italy May 8. The Rome conference brings together researchers from around the world focused on groundbreaking research to slow, reverse or prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. A life-long social entrepreneur and former non-profit executive, Tokarsky will present "The Enigma of Eroom’s Law and The Wall Street Math Stifling Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery" in Rome. He wants to talk about funding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. But he’s not talking about just asking major corporations or the government or even Big Pharma for help. Tokarsky wants everyone to pitch in. And he’s figured out a way we can.

Companies are going public without revenues and the stock market is jittery. It feels like we’ve been here before, but there are some important differences.

Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

How do you drive investors to spend money on cutting-edge cancer treatments? One idea, according to economist Andrew Lo, is to sell securities in a megafund of research projects. Economics correspondent Paul Solman explores how financial engineering could be the starting point for curing cancer.

A biotech focused on developing drugs to treat genetic diseases just raised $135 million. BridgeBio Pharma, which was founded in 2015, builds out subsidiary companies around different inherited genetic diseases. The series C round was co-led by investment firms Viking Global Investors and KKR, which were joined by Perceptive Advisors, AIG, Aisling Capital, Cormorant Capital, and Janus Funds.