"Uncertainty around how long it will take to find a cure for different forms of cancer is forcing investors to reconsider pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into pharmaceuticals.

"But offering long-term debt rather than venture capital can help draw them back, according to Andrew Lo, Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was speaking at the Financial Innovations in Healthcare conference, held at London Business School (LBS) and supported by the AQR Asset Management Institute."

"Americans pay some of the world's highest rates for health care coverage and drug therapies. Although these costs hurt consumers, drug companies point out that the U.S. system allows them to bring new therapies to market faster and sometimes exclusively for domestic patients. Still, tabs like $84,000 for a curative hepatitis C treatment price most people out, even those with the best insurance.

"Andrew Lo, a finance professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of its Laboratory for Financial Engineering, has proposed a fix of sorts. He and fellow researcher David Weinstock, a physician at the Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, recently published a paper in the journal of Science Translational Medicine that shows how capital markets could finance these costly treatments in the same way that consumers bankroll other large purchases, like mortgages."

"Consumers take out loans every day to purchase houses, cars, and college tuition. What if they could do the same for expensive medicines?

"It’s an idea that a group of Boston-area health economists floated last month in response to the rising cost of prescription drugs. And as envisioned, everyone involved in health care and finance could benefit from the availability of a health care loan..."

Luke Timmerman includes Andrew Lo on a list of leaders he hypothetically would like to assemble into a "dream team" to address issues of drug pricing.

A new class of medications was recently approved that cures more than 95 percent of people with Hepatitis C in only six weeks at a cost of about $84,000 per person, and new therapies with price tags that are likely to exceed $1 million per person are now available or coming soon. How can patients possibly afford them?

"It was during the financial crisis that Andrew Lo had his epiphany: The way to save health care from ever-rising costs is by bringing in the banks. Specifically, by packaging drug development costs into securities to be bought and sold by Wall Street—the very, um, mortgage-bundling technique that blew up the economy in 2007. “The reason the financial crisis happened is not because securitization didn’t work. It happened because it worked way too well,” says Lo, a professor of financial engineering at MIT. Securitization injected a huge pool of money into mortgages—what if you could inject that pool of money into a worthwhile cause and, ahem, do it responsibly?

"So Lo, who has seen his mother and several friends die from cancer, wants to use the techniques of Wall Street to fix healthcare. In a new paper in Science Translational Medicine, he and his coauthors propose creating loans for patients whose insurance policies don’t cover ultra-expensive treatments like the cure for hepatitis C—loans that would be financed by bundling them and selling to Wall Street investors..."

"Economist, finance professor and investment manager Andrew Lo says some of the 'financial weapons of mass destruction' that helped trigger the 2008-'09crisis can be used for good. If deployed in megafunds by teams of savvy money managers and scientists, he believes, the securitization of intellectual property related to biomedical research could yield lucrative returns while also breathing life into what the biotechnology industry calls the valley of death - neglected early-stage, risky drug development projects for the rarest and most intractable diseases. But Lo, who has conducted several simulations that he says show this strategy could work, is just the idea guy..."

We are making breakthroughs almost weekly in our understanding of cancer and other deadly diseases, both in how to treat and – in some cases – how to cure them. So why is funding for early stage biomedical research and development declining just when we need it most? One answer is that the financial risk of drug development has increased, and investors don’t like risk. What if we could reduce the risk and increase the reward through financial engineering? By applying tools like portfolio theory, securitization, and derivative securities to construct “megafunds” that invest in many biomedical projects, we can tap into the power of global financial markets to raise billions of dollars. If structured properly, investors can earn attractive returns with tolerable levels of risk, and many more patients can get the drugs they desperately need. Finance doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game; we can do well by doing good if we have sufficient scale.

"In collaboration with Prof. Andrew Lo at MIT Sloan School of Management and Laboratory for Financial Engineering, Dr. Yang’s current research focus is developing and implementing novel business and financing models that utilize bond market capital for financing biomedical drug development..." [Original article is in Chinese]

"Right now, the Food and Drug Administration will not approve a drug if there is more than a 2.5 percent chance that it doesn’t work — no matter the disease or how poor the prognosis.

"There is a cold logic to this approach. And in a recently published paper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology finance professor Andrew Lo took the FDA to task for not being more flexible."

"Andrew Lo, professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of business and money manager (AlphaSimplex), believes that Wall Street-style financial engineering can hasten cures for cancer and other diseases while providing healthy returns to investors.

"During an MIT Sloan webcast on Thursday, Lo said that preliminary research conducted by him and his colleagues indicated that a “mega” primary research-focused fund could produce returns to bondholders of 5% to 8%, while equity shareholders could expect returns ranging from 8% to 12%. An investment fund with interests in perhaps hundreds of research projects could also provide investors with returns not correlated to the S&P 500..."

"Forget venture capital firms investing in promising biotech startups. If we really want to cure cancer, we need pension funds and insurers putting billions of dollars into a fund made up of hundreds of research projects, according to an MIT professor.

"Since 2012, Andrew Lo, a finance professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has been proposing that financiers create a $30 billion “megafund” that invests in early-stage cancer research and development..."

"New research from a pair of MIT economists argues that the Food and Drug Administration, which decides which new drugs get to market through randomized clinical trials, is too one-size-fits-all in its approach to the approval process for treatments for everything from leukemia to the flu. As a result, they say, the agency is too conservative in regulating trials for severe diseases like pancreatic cancer and not conservative enough when it comes to drugs for less dire ones like prostate cancer..."

"As Congress tries to figure out how to speed up the drug approval process, a pair of economists [Andrew Lo and Vahid Montazerhodjat] are asking a different question: Are the criteria we use to choose which drugs are safe and effective too inflexible?

"At the core of this question are two kinds of mistakes that federal regulators can make when deciding whether or not to approve a new drug. The first is pretty straightforward: If they set the evidence bar too low, drugs that don't work and carry dangerous side effects could end up on the market. The second error is less obvious: If they set the bar too high, effective medicines may end up in the dustbin instead of in the hands of patients..."