Andrew Lo, the MIT professor who recently proposed creating a megafund to finance a cure for cancer, has another way for the financial services community to help eradicate seemingly intractable diseases. Lo was the keynote speaker at a data science conference put on by the consulting group Mass Insight last Friday. The purpose of the conference was to explore how Massachusetts could become a leader in Big Data and machine learning. It brought together everyone from bank executives to venture capitalists to government officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Professor Andrew Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says he wants to be like Harvey Lodish and help save the life of a relative one day. Lodish, a molecular and cell biologist at MIT, helped develop a drug to treat a rare genetic disorder known as Gaucher disease. Little did Lodish know at the time that later his grandson would be diagnosed with this disorder and Lodish’s pioneering work would save his grandson’s life. Lo’s goal may seem lofty considering he is a financial economist, not a doctor or a scientist. Like many of us, he has watched helpless as family members and friends are diagnosed with cancer. But sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office one day, Lo decided to follow in Harvey Lodish’s footsteps and take the first step towards saving a life.

Patients with a rare, chronic disease can find themselves in a conundrum when seeking treatment: Researchers can’t find enough patients to enroll in a statistically rigorous clinical trial and there is uncertainty in the regulatory path. Frustrated by the lack of treatment options on the market, patients may be willing to accept a certain level of risk that device manufacturers normally shy away from.

"Not that long ago, it looked like it was game over for the field of study that produced the mortgage backed security, the credit default swap and all manner of other exotic derivatives that exploded so spectacularly in the financial crisis of 2008.

"Now, financial engineering theory is being touted by several academics as the key to curing cancer faster, reducing the impact of climate change and imposing better risk discipline on the same banks that were once almost felled by the discipline’s creations..."

On this episode of the HBO documentary series, Andrew Lo discusses an idea he and colleagues developed with regard to the FDA approval process. They've developed a model that incorporates patient preferences into the design of clinical trials in order to set appropriate thresholds for FDA approval.

"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]