"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..."

A new report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is faulting the U.S. government for failing to maintain and grow its investments in basic scientific research, even as European and Asian nations are dramatically increasing their research and development (R&D) spending. Andrew Lo, a finance professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the report's authors, says the cutbacks in basic research could have a high cost in both national prestige and long-term economic opportunity.

U.S. securities regulators have tapped a list of well-known stock market experts to serve on a new advisory panel tasked with helping shape rules affecting high-speed traders and dark pools.

For years, Brad Margus has juggled two goals as chief executive: Make money, and find cures for his children. He just co-founded a startup, Exigence Neurosciences Inc., in part to seek treatments for his two sons who have ataxia-telangiectasia or A-T, a rare progressive and eventually fatal neurological disease... “The amount of money needed to develop a single drug is so much more than what pure altruism can fund,” says Andrew Lo.

The quest for a treatment that can combat Alzheimer’s remains frustrating and expensive, but Andrew Lo believes he may have a path forward. A finance professor who directs the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Lo thinks that a public-private partnership could solve some of the funding issues that have plagued drug discovery and development.

Researchers argue for a public-private superfund to advance many Alzheimer’s therapeutics projects in parallel.

MIT economist, Andrew W. Lo, calls for Alzheimer’s ‘megafund’.

More than 5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, the affliction that erodes memory and other mental capacities, but no drugs targeting the disease have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 2003. Now a paper by an MIT professor, Andrew W. Lo, suggests that a revamped way of financing Alzheimer’s research could spur the development of useful new drugs for the illness.

Creative investments could fund a huge number of new drug-development projects.

Here in the Boston area, cancer researchers abound. But there is something of a crisis in the field. As a professor/friend of mine who runs a lab here in town tells me, research has identified a host of therapeutic targets, but “results from the clinic have not produced encouraging outcomes and, to date, there have been no reliable lasting responses to therapies against many malignancies.”It seems that cancer cells are proving better than researchers thought at evasion. They evolve, adapting to treatments and circumventing them. Out-of-the-box thinking, and funding, may be what’s necessary.