Give me your innovators yearning to breathe free

by Bernard Munos, FasterCures Senior Fellow

Ingenuity defines America. From sea to shining sea, the country bristles with innovation. Google, eBay, Intel, Tesla, Yahoo, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook, exemplify the indomitable American genius… or perhaps the indomitable genius of its immigrants, as all these companies were (co-) founded by foreign-born entrepreneurs.

This is no artifact. Economic geography shows that innovation thrives where cultures blend. It is true of countries built by immigrants, such as the United States, Australia, or Israel. It is also clear from the capitals of former European empires – Berlin, Vienna/Budapest, Paris, London – where the mingling of ethnicities created the ferment that transformed them into cosmopolitan beacons of artistic and technological power. Further back in history, Florence, Venice, Rome, Athens, Constantinople, and Alexandria have all at some point leveraged their positions on trading routes, or their dominion over faraway provinces, to create the cultures that gave us the Renaissance, Hellenism, and the Islamic golden age – when roving scholars from Cordoba to Bukhara made major contributions to medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. 

Today, innovation continues to thrive where cultures overlap: Silicon Valley, Boston, Quebec, Singapore, the Baltic Rim, Switzerland, Flanders, and many other regions.  In the United States, the foreign-born represent 12% of the population, but they account for 25% of its Nobel prizes, 25% of the founders of venture-backed companies,30% of its patents , and 47% of its scientists and engineers with doctorate degrees. Immigrants are over-represented among members of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and among the authors of highly-cited science and engineering journal articles.

It is as if innovation somehow comes more naturally to people who internalize various cultures. Research and casual observation actually support that idea. Polyglots know, for instance, that one does not think alike in various languages. A Frenchman does not think like a German. One is holistic, the other is methodical. These differences carry over to how we solve problems. Some cultures are analytic and reductionist, others are intuitive and associative. No single approach is better, but, depending upon the problem, some may be more appropriate. People steeped in multiple cultures can access a broader set of problem-solving pathways and pick one that best fits the situation at hand.

There are other reasons that put immigrants at an advantage when it comes to innovation. They are apt at challenging norms and authority, and prone to act when unhappy with their lot. With their accents and customs, they never quite fit in, and are used to being different and operating from the margin. They are also at ease with disruption, which is part and parcel of being an immigrant. Like entrepreneurs, they have a tolerance for risk, and a bias for action.  And they top that with a relentless drive to succeed because they can never be completely mainstream.

Research also shows that immigrants have an uncanny ability to function in multiple worlds at the same time. They often grow up speaking one language at home and a different one at school, and they sometimes must learn several languages as their parents change countries to flee war or persecution. Those who become scientists retain the agility to move back and forth between multiple domains. They are boundary crossers, with interest and expertise in multiple disciplines, but operating preferably at their interface. They are not biologists or chemists or physicists, they straddle the boundaries between these sciences, and can see connections that might elude less versatile scientists. This makes them especially effective problem-solvers. They think differently, can approach problems from various angles, and harness multiple problem-solving tools.

With such attributes, one would think that countries blessed with immigrants would see them as assets to be leveraged, not a ball and chain on the economy. Indeed, those that value them, such as Israel, are among the world’s most innovative societies.  But most nations see immigrants unfavorably, like welfare collectors, and relegate them to camps and ghettos. It does not help that many have a precarious immigration status – like temporary visas that get overstayed or no visa at all. But then, people who flee war and misery seldom have their papers in order. This makes much of the current US debate on immigrants – and whether they arrived legally – a bit disingenuous. We should do what best serves the interests of America, and not lose ourselves in legalistic arguments.  Immigration is like free-trade. It benefits a country, even if the other party does not play fair. Just as a nation gains from engaging in free-trade, even if its partners do not reciprocate, it also gains from welcoming immigrants, however they arrived. This is not a plea to lift all restrictions, but one to manage them wisely.

Immigrants build great nations, but as societies mature, they tend to lose their vitality. They become risk-averse while entrenched interests and bureaucracy combine to enshrine the status quo into complex regulations that deter change and innovation. America has aged better than most, due in no small part to the fact that it remains by far the top destination for the migrants of the world, taking in roughly 20% of its “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. This has been America’s enduring success formula: a multicultural society constantly refreshed by a flux of immigrants that accomplish here what they could have never done elsewhere. Immigration has given us many of our leading scholars and entrepreneurs, and the technological advances that have shaped our society and the world. Let’s make it easier for immigrants to continue to help us remain in the vanguard of innovation. No one else will.

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Evaluating “Value”: How Do We Foster Innovation in Today’s Cost-Conscious Healthcare Environment?

Two out of three participants in a recent FasterCures workshop believe that patients’ needs and priorities are not driving decisions made by payers, innovators, and providers. To have a stronger grasp on the role the patient can and must play in reimbursement decisions, FasterCures and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation convened a one-day multi-stakeholder workshop earlier this month titled, “Value and Innovation: What Will the New Day Look Like for Patients?”

Fifty-three leaders participated from across the four Ps – venture philanthropy patientorganizations from TRAIN (the Research Acceleration and Innovation Network), biotechnology and pharmaceutical company executives, payers (public and private), and provider organizations.

Anchoring the day-long conversation, the first of five sessions focused on the stakes for patients in a cost-constrained environment, and how patients and their advocates can help shape the dialogue and decisions about who will pay for development of new treatments and rising healthcare costs. An overview of the Affordable Care Act followed, providing important context to the conversation about curbing health care costs. Next, the group focused on resources and infrastructure for research being created by innovative patient foundations – and how these groups are doing more and more to transform both the path toward cure and care for their disease. The fourth session looked into the types and sources of evidence payers use and are looking for to make informed reimbursement decisions. Finally, participants dug into the meaning of the term “value” and how new payment and delivery models are driving the definition of value and affecting innovation.

Five themes surfaced during the dynamic discussion:

1. Patient-relevant outcomes will ultimately drive the definition of value: Patient engagement in all stages of drug and device research and development, care delivery and payment decisions is vital. Determining and measuring outcomes that are important to patients is an emerging area of research and practice that will require experimentation and refinement.
2. Innovators and patients need to understand the evidentiary needs of payers: Defining what evidence is needed and collecting it at the earliest possible point can help drive toward a shared understanding of value across all stakeholder groups. High quality evidence is needed to make regulatory and payment decisions and will ultimately be generated through both traditional and novel study designs and analytical methods.
3. Better data is needed to make better decisions: A lot of data and information is being collected and stored from multiple sources across multiple platforms. Agreeing on standards and facilitating stronger interoperability would enable sample sizes to grow and better evidence to be harvested for the benefit of all stakeholders.
4. All stakeholders agree that it’s imperative to remove waste from the healthcare system: Up to 50 percent of healthcare delivered is of uncertain value and this uncertainty impacts all stakeholders. Cost pressures can force payers into the uncomfortable role of being “watchdogs” for quality and the evidence available to make decisions is uneven and may be applied inconsistently by different payers in the system.
5. The concept of value is derived from the total cost of a patient’s care, not the cost of an individual product: There is a strong need to unite sources of information about costs of care delivered in different settings by different providers, including family caregivers, and to identify means to calculate savings achieved through prevention and avoidance of harms. Costs of individual products are important but not sufficient to inform decisions about effective care to achieve better health outcomes for the individual and the broader population.

The call to cut waste out of the health care system and streamline the process of finding, delivering, and paying for the best possible therapy was a resounding theme.  Patient groups may also find themselves in the unfamiliar position of having to advocate for reducing inefficient treatments and care for their own patients out of the system.

Participants concurred that innovation and value aren’t mutually exclusive concepts and in fact need to be mutually reinforcing. Balancing the real-world competitive market factors for innovators and payers while striving to meet patient needs will require transparency, flexibility, communication, and – above all – trust within and between stakeholder groups.

These are issues of growing concern to many organizations with diverse constituencies and you’ll be hearing more about them. FasterCures will issue a detailed report on the workshop and its outcomes and an upcoming blog post will focus on recommendations generated at the workshop.

Top 10 Medical Research Trends to Watch in 2013

By Margaret Anderson, Executive Director of FasterCures

As seen in The Huffington Post

1. Federal funding: Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Congress has pushed the date of the "sequester" off another two months, delaying the prospect of automatic 8.2 percent cuts in the budgets of NIH, FDA, and other federal science programs. But a sequester (or other cuts) could still happen. Consider that current funding for these programs expires in March, the FY14 budgets are still being drafted, and there will likely be a fight over the debt ceiling. Advocates need to keep making noise to make a compelling case for the critical importance of medical research. The health of our citizens and the economic and fiscal health of the nation are at stake. Resources are available on our Sequestration Station website; also check out our Time Equals Lives social media campaign, where you can contribute your story to show our leaders why medical research matters, because we will all be patients eventually.

2. FDA: Recalibrating the benefit-risk equation. 

Patient groups have been saying for years that people living with a disease are often willing to accept more risk than the FDA is generally willing to tolerate in a new product. Well, now the agency can do something about it. In 2012, the latest reauthorization of PDUFA created a new "Patient-Focused Drug Development" initiative at the FDA, which allows the FDA to formally consult with patients -- initially in 20 disease areas -- about what their priorities are and what tradeoffs they are willing to accept. It may not sound revolutionary, but it could represent the beginning of a paradigm shift in the regulatory process if they get the process right, and if we don't get bogged down in fighting over what the 20 disease areas are. This will be an important initiative to track and be active in this year, and an important area for the FDA to focus on across its enters.
By the way, we heard at Partnering for Cures that nobody thanks the FDA -- so here we go! Way to go, FDA, on a second year in a row of 30-plus new drug approvals. If they do it again in 2013, is it a trend?

Saying thank you to FDA's Janet Woodcock

3. Financial innovation: Attack of the megafund. 

In October 2012, MIT finance professor Andrew Lo and colleagues proposed creation of a $30 billion "megafund" to bridge the translational research-finance gap by using financial engineering to securitize a highly diversified portfolio of therapies in development, an idea FasterCures got a preview of at its Financial Innovations Lab in July 2011. The model securitizes a portfolio of research assets as collateral to raise funds in the capital markets using a mix of debt and equity that appeal to a variety of investors' risk-reward ratios. Is this the kind of large-scale solution required for the big problem of financing risky research, particularly at the early stages? Lo plans a conference in 2013 to further develop the idea. Stay tuned for more work in this area by FasterCures and the Milken Institute in 2013, because this is one of the issues we are hearing the most consternation about.

4. Reimbursement: Can value drive innovation? 

Concerns in the pharma industry about the impact of reimbursement on their upstream R&D strategies are escalating, as efforts to rein in health-care costs are gaining steam. But do medical progress and the quality of care have to be sacrificed on the altar of cost-cutting? We heard some interesting discussion in 2012 from former pharma exec Frank Douglas and his new Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron about the concept of "value-driven engineering" in medical devices, based on the principles of clinical utility, reduced complexity, and cost savings and efficiency. Douglas believes this framework can be applied to drug development as well. Can we shorten the time from molecule to hu(man) to ultimately drive down costs for payers? Will a focus on value be an innovation killer, as some fear, or can it be a disruptive driver for companies to tackle risky areas of high unmet need and first-in-class therapies? What is the methodology for deciding value? Where do patients fit into the equation? We look forward to more broad-based discussions of -- and hopefully more answers to -- these critical issues in 2013, as reimbursement could be our next cliff, if we survive the fiscal one.

5. Venture philanthropy: Playing in the major leagues.

FasterCures has been tracking and supporting the rise of venture philanthropy in medical research for almost a decade, and these strategic, patient-driven research funders have hit the big leagues and gotten the attention of the large pharma companies. Small companies have found them valuable sources of seed capital and other non-financial assets for some time, but large pharma has been slower to understand what they bring to the table. 2012 saw the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (fresh off a big success investing in Vertex's newly-approved drug Kalydeco) invest $58 million in Pfizer's research into therapies targeting the most common CF subtype (yes, you read that right -- the foundation is funding Pfizer), and Sanofi awarded $300,000 to a team of patient groups to create a cross-disease registry to accelerate translational research. Companies like Merck Serono and Celgene are working with nonprofits like the National MS Society and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society as "talent scouts" of sorts to identify promising early-stage research. As foundation head Bonnie Addario advised a company CEO at Partnering for Cures in November, "Put us on your boards -- we put you on ours!" We call that speaking truth to power.

6. Academic research: Let's see you do that again. 

Industry and investors are becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of reproducibility of positive results from academic science published in peer-reviewed journals. In 2012, Amgen could not reproduce the results of 47 out of 53 so-called "landmark" oncology studies, and in 2011 Bayer discontinued 65 percent of its target validation projects when its results did not match published experiments. Some patient groups, like the ALS Therapy Development Institute and the Chordoma Foundation, have made replication of published results and validation of research products a core piece of their missions. Some investors are funding their own "killer experiments" before making investment decisions, and efforts like Science Exchange's Reproducibility Initiative are cropping up to find ways to systematically address the disincentives for academic researchers to validate their findings. Expect this debate to get louder in 2013 -- and hopefully coalesce around some productive solutions.

7. Data standards: Coming soon to a therapeutic area near you. 

We hear over and over again that medical research desperately needs standards for collecting and analyzing data, but it's always seemed like a bite too big to chew. But the Critical Path Institute and CDISC are stepping up to the plate with CFAST, the Coalition for the Advancement of Standards and Therapies, in partnership with the FDA and the new industry consortium TransCelerate. We first heard about it at Partnering for Cures 2011, and it formally launched in October 2012, but it already has standards in seven therapeutic areas (out of 55 targeted) in various states of development. Watch for accelerated progress in 2013.

8. The other translation gap: Turning outputs into outcomes. 

FasterCures has spent a lot of time focusing on the "first translation gap," between basic scientific discoveries and research in humans subjects; somewhat outside our scope has been "T2," the gap between approval of a treatment and its adoption into widespread use to improve patient outcomes, which can take as long as the R&D process. Many others have analyzed this problem, but the ImproveCareNow network has gone from analysis to action, creating a rapid learning system that is speeding the adoption of evidence-based care practices for kids with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis at almost 50 care centers across the country and improving their health dramatically. The Kauffman Foundation is working to scale and replicate their success through its Health Network Trust initiative. We hope 2013 will see this model launched in other disease areas.

9. Collaboration: Writing the playbook. 

There now seems to be broad acceptance of the idea that collaboration among R&D stakeholders (government, academia, industry, nonprofits) is required if we are going to make progress in an increasingly complex scientific and business environment. There are many experiments in collaboration going on, and many successful outcomes that can be highlighted. It is time for more systematic analysis of what's working and what's not. While these efforts vary widely depending on the goals and the collaborators, can we draw some common lessons about, for example, what are fertile areas for collaboration, what one should look for in partners, what are the pitfalls to avoid? After all, as Luke Timmerman of Xconomy wrote recently, what we're after isn't collaboration for its own sake, it's a "creative rethinking of the biomedical R&D continuum," and "while those [collaborative] efforts are encouraging, this really should be a national conversation that involves a whole lot more players." Will 2013 be the year we start trying to know what we know, and perhaps even start redrawing that linear R&D pipeline we all know so well?

10. Innovation: Who's outside the box (you tell us). 

While there's no shortage of brilliant scientists and discoveries in medical research, it can be notoriously hard to move them forward in the expensive environments of academia and industry, where risk is not necessarily rewarded. We are seeing more efforts to try to bust out of this box in ways that are more common in other fields. Philanthropist Peter Thiel, who started out by giving young people $100,000 to skip college and work on their ideas, has established Breakout Labs to fund early-stage companies with radical ideas. The National Institutes of Health is getting into the action with its "skip the post-doc" Early Independence Awards to help free exceptional young minds from the academic treadmill. Jimmy Lin's Rare Genomics Institute is crowdfunding genomic sequencing for patients with rare diseases -- and there's much discussion about crowdfunding's utility in life sciences. Crowdsourcing is gaining traction in life sciences, from FoldIt's online protein folding games to Transparency Life Sciences' crowdsourced clinical study design. Who will be redefining "the box" in 2013? You tell us -- send us your ideas at info@fastercures.org.

Improving patient outcomes through technology

We hear a lot these days about how data sharing and collaboration have great potential to reduce the cost of healthcare and improve outcomes for patients – but who is actually doing it? What is at stake, what are the barriers, and what are potentially scalable solutions?

A Partnering for Cures panel focused on a case example of a patient-centric demonstration project within the ImproveCareNow Network, which includes 44 pediatric gastrointestinal care centers and more than 13,000 patients, and has succeeded in improving remission rates by sharing best practices among care teams across sites. Moderator Dominique Pahud of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation introduced the goals, design, and participants leading the technology intervention.

The project features a collaboration among entrepreneurs, patients, physicians, designers, and researchers to provide a backbone for pediatric gastrointestinal care centers that delivers a full integration of technology-based solutions, including electronic health records, passive monitoring, and patient-recorded outcomes. The collaboration is employing a suite of technology interventions at eight different centers within the ImproveCareNow Network, representing 2,400 patients.

Each panelist discussed his or her contributions to the collaboration, with Richard Colletti of the University of Vermont School of Medicine introducing the operations and goals. Colletti highlighted that the remission rate of pediatric gastrointestinal patients increased from 50 percent to 75 percent since the establishment of the network in 2007, noting that “if we had done this with a new drug, it would be a drug that everyone would want to use.”

Peter Margolis of the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine discussed the founding of the network and the establishment of the revenue model, which relies on care centers paying to participate. He also highlighted the collaborative learning system of the network, which is based on a “steal shamelessly, share seamlessly” ethos.

Designers that were involved in creating the technology backbone also spoke on the panel, including John Chaffins of Lybba. Chaffins described the method that Lybba used to design apps, which was based on avatars that were used to solidify the concept of a “patient,” which he said “became a tool for thinking about the kind of design choices you are making … and establishing a common language” in the collaboration.

Anmol Madan of Ginger.io addressed his biggest challenges in being a health-focused entrepreneur, such as getting access to healthcare providers in order to understand their technology needs. He also commented that “the biggest value [of participating in the collaboration] was getting the validation we need to go from an interesting technology to a commercial product.”

Finally, John Wilbanks of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation returned the conversation to the 10,000-foot level to discuss the challenges and opportunities for collaboration among multiple players in the biomedical space. As the developer of the intellectual property framework for the collaboration, he spoke of the need for an organizational structure that makes collaboration possible, including a “framework that allows for the creation of both private and public value.”

The panelists highlighted a range of organizational incentives for joining the project, and invited the audience to join the movement toward open, value-adding collaboration.

Disruptive innovation in the biopharma industry

“Disruptive innovation” is a concept made popular by the business community that is starting to catch on in the biopharmaceutical industry. During the Partnering for Cures panel “Beyond business as usual: Disrupting the biopharma business model,” a distinguished group of panelists discussed both the problems with the current bio-pharma business model and possible disruptive solutions that would make the system more effective.

Moderator Gautam Jaggi of Ernst & Young’s Global Life Sciences Center started off the conversation by stating that as big pharma is experiencing ever increasing development times and costs, “The time has literally never been better to make changes to the R&D system through disruption.”

Tomasz Sablinski of Transparency Life Sciences and Celtic Therapeutics pointed out that it is not the people involved in R&D that are causing the problems, such as high failure rates and increasing costs, but something inherent in the playing field: “These people are smart as individuals, but there is something about the system that causes smart people to create poor results.”

All panelists agreed that biopharma companies need to figure out more quickly which targets will not work (also known as “fast fail”). As Stephen Marc Paul of Weill Cornell Medical College noted, “Last stage attrition is killing these companies. We need to figure out earlier in the process which drugs will not work so that we can create a pipeline of late-stage molecules with a higher probability of success.” 

The sharing of ideas and data is another theme that kept surfacing in the discussion. Representing patient advocacy groups, Kathy Giusti of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation stated that “Patients are investors too, and they can put pressure on academic centers to make their data public.” According to Giusti, this is just one example of how patient groups can be a disruptive force when their passion and sense of urgency is given a seat at the table.

Bernard Munos of InnoThink noted that sometimes “The translational challenges might be too big for one company alone; the science is just too tough. Companies can wear themselves out. Companies should try to work with their competitors and join forces.”

Ben Shapiro of PureTech Ventures believes that real disruption will come when big industry realizes that “Pharma’s role should be to invest in the best ideas out there” and that instead of doing their own internal research, pharma companies should be focused on stepping in where venture capital has left a hole and finding the best idea from the outside.

If biopharma companies would take a more nimble and innovative approach to finding and sharing the best ideas, both from inside and outside their company walls, we would see progress accelerate, panelists agreed.

Applying innovations to life sciences investment

During a recent panel at Partnering for Cures, experts discussed the financing gap in life sciences and spotlighted varying perspectives on the “VC retreat” and the need to apply innovative financial and operational models to finding and funding science that holds the promise of helping patients. Renowned leaders in investment deliberated challenges in the life sciences eco-system and challenges that prevent life sciences from becoming a better investment sector. Panelists candidly shared varying points of view – from finding the incentive to kill bad experiments to the pros and cons of collecting big data.

Jens Eckstein of SR One, GlaxoSmithKline’s independent healthcare venture capital organization, noted that “syndication is the biggest problem we are facing in the early stages.” Eckstein argued that a major issue in bioscience today is that “things go to the clinic that should never go to the clinic,” with little incentive, both from academia and pharma, to kill inefficient and bad projects. As a result, he said, an inefficient system with little change in attrition in clinical development over the past 20 years has developed, creating a more difficult investment climate for everyone. Eckstein also argued that sample size and finding individuals to curate data in a useful manner are tasks still too big to tackle.

Alastair J.J. Wood of Symphony Capital echoed Eckstein’s comments, stating “I think the current [development] model is fundamentally broken.” Wood hailed a new approach to drug development that mirrors the distributed partnering model mentioned in FasterCures’ Fixes in Financing report. Wood believes that the status quo of picking winners, as pharma tends to do, is fundamentally flawed and argued that without changing the system to spread risk adequately, there is no means of attracting new capital. On data sharing, Wood was more optimistic than Eckstein, calling for the availability of pre-clinical data and the usefulness it will provide in determining the effectiveness of compounds and viability of new drugs on the market.

Likewise, Garen Staglin of One Mind for Research and Dan Hartman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also saw huge potential in data sharing and stressed the importance of public-private partnerships and the need to bring individuals together. “By bringing people together, we have a shorter distance to go,” noted Hartman. Staglin stated that the key for developing cures can be found in bringing different sectors together and creating stronger collaboration. “Incidence rate of illnesses do not know geographic boundaries nor does the science that will help us unlock it,” he said. Hartman agreed, noting that “with access to data, we decide where to put money for products that actually help people.”

Moderator Chris Varma of Blueprint Medicine asked a poignant question: If the product development cycle is shorter in other fields, such as IT, and prediction methods to better estimate outcomes are so much better in other fields, why do we still invest in life sciences? Eckstein gave a response that summed up the feelings of the panelists: “If things work, we can make a tremendous difference.” With the right collaboration, resources, investment, and the right optimism, science has the capability to achieve amazing things.

3 Cool Things the British are Doing

All eyes were on the United Kingdom during the 30th Summer Olympic Games in London. The UK captivated the world, reminding us of its rich culture and history while delivering athletic thrills. Though this summer’s games provided reason enough to applaud the UK, its remarkable national commitment to  biomedical innovation should garner equal praise. Here are three reasons why:

1. The initiative to make all national health service (NHS) patient data available for research: In a move that will dramatically alter the landscape for medical and public health research in the UK, the British government plans to make electronic health records from the National Health Service (NHS) widely available for research by 2013. Prime Minister David Cameron announced the groundbreaking decision at the first Global Health Policy Summit held last month, saying the move is part of the UK’s effort to secure a global leadership position in biomedical research. The prime minister said his government will change the NHS data sharing policy from an opt-in basis to an opt-out standard, meaning anonymized patient data will be available for all patients who do not actively decline to participate. The opportunities this policy offers are vast, providing medical researchers access to patient data on an unprecedented scale and potentially delivering life-saving advances in our understanding of managing disease and preserving health.  


2. Leveraging olympic infrastructure for biomedical research: Creating a provident legacy from the London Olympic Games, the anti-doping facility, provided for the Games by GlaxoSmithKline and operated by King’s College, will be repurposed as a new medical research center focused on biomarker discovery and development of targeted therapies. Sponsored jointly by the United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Department of Health’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre will be a unique resource focused on analyzing the phenome, the collection of an organism’s expressed traits, including all the proteins and active cellular signaling pathways. Researchers will search for biomarkers that can help identify susceptibility to – and protection from – disease, and may lead to precisely targeted prevention and treatment strategies. 


3. Construction of the New Francis Crick Institute: Even as the massive undertaking of preparing for and hosting the Olympic Games was underway in London, construction of the new Francis Crick Institute, possibly Europe’s largest dedicated research laboratory building, was progressing simultaneously. Scheduled to open in 2015, the Francis Crick Institute will be home to 1,500 staff, including 1,250 scientists, and 120 research groups. The institute is the product of a six-way partnership between Cancer Research UK, the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, University College London, Imperial College London, and King’s College London. It is designed to attract leading scientific talent from around the world and will work collaboratively with United Kingdom hospitals and universities to study cancer, heart disease, infections, stroke, and immune disorders, illnesses linked to aging and obesity, and other medical issues. The Francis Crick Institute will play a key role in training the nation’s top scientists and in supporting the worldwide biomedical research mission. 

FasterCures has been following the UK’s innovation efforts with interest.  We were pleased to welcome Sir Michael Rawlins, Chairman of the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), to last year’s Partnering for Cures meeting to talk about the difficult choices Brits have to make when it comes to deciding which new treatments and therapies to cover in a centralized, single-payer system.  This year, we’re happy to have Chas Bountra, Chief Scientist for the Structural Genomics Consortium at University of Oxford coming to discuss its efforts to spearhead "open access" chemistry partnership – a new model for pre-competitive drug discovery in which the public and private sectors collaborate to generate potent and selective pharmacological inhibitors of human proteins that regulate epigenetic signalling, and commit to make these reagents available without restriction on use.

 

3 Reasons You Can't Miss Partnering for Cures

1. It's all about solutions. This meeting is designed to get things done - from dynamic panel discussions about transformative ideas and successful models, to the dozens of case study presentations about innovative paths toward meeting R&D goals.
2. It's all about collaboration. No other meeting of this scale is solely dedicated to forging strategic cross-sector collaborations. You will learn about innovative partnerships that are paving the path toward a more effective and efficient R&D system, and find partners who could make a meaningful difference.
3. It's YOUR meeting. Whether you're looking for an investor or a scientific partner, a customized partnering system allows you to easily connect with potential allies from all sectors of medical research. Experts will be available on-site for one-on-one, free consultation sessions to help address your challenges. It is a unique opportunity to get a pulse on trends and best practices that matter to you and what you do.

Look who's speaking:

Francis Collins
Director, National Institutes of Health

Janet Woodcock
Director, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration

William Chin
Executive Dean for Research, Harvard Medical School

Frank L. Douglas
President and CEO, Austen BioInnovation Institute

Regis B. Kelly
Director, The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, University of California

Stelios Papadopoulos
Co-Founder and Chairman, Exelixis

Kim J. Popovits
President and CEO, Genomic Health, Inc.

Jay Schnitzer
Director, Defense Sciences Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Scott Johnson
President, CEO and Founder, Myelin Repair Foundation

Todd Sherer
CEO, Michael J. Fox Foundation

... and many more

Learn more about Partnering for Cures

Join >800 forward-thinking leaders:

Biotech and Pharma Senior Executives

• Business Development Teams
• Advocacy and Alliance Leaders
• Federal Affairs Directors

Academic Medical Center Leaders

• Research Hospital Executives
• Institute Directors
• Principal Investigators

Life Science Investors

• Venture Capitalists
• Medical Philanthropists
• Wealth Advisors

Medical Research Innovators

• Patient Advocates
• Disease Foundation Executives
• Venture Philanthropists

Government Decision Makers

• Federal Funders
• Federal Researchers and Regulators
• Research Policy Makers

... and many more

Calling all Medical Research Innovators

Summer’s almost over and everyone at FasterCures is gearing up for an exciting Fall. We hope you’ve marked your calendars to join us at the fourth annual Partnering for Cures meeting November 28-30 in New York City. It will be here before we know it and amazing panels and speakers are starting to populate the program. 

With less than one month left to apply for one of the 30 innovator presentation slots, we need your applications! If your organization is engaged in an innovative, cross-sector collaboration aimed at reducing the time and cost of getting new medical solutions from discovery to patients, we want to hear from you!



Who can apply? Partnerships that include representatives from two or more of the following sectors – nonprofit foundations, pharmaceutical/biotechnology companies, research institutes, universities, government agencies, investors, and private philanthropists. Collaborations should be established, not merely proposed.

This year we’re particularly (though not exclusively) interested in hearing from partnerships focused on:

1. Translation/commercialization of early stage discoveries
2. Data sharing
3. Novel research tool development
4. Asset repurposing
5. Innovative financial models

Each 25 minute presentation will provide an opportunity to engage potential investors, partners, and/or collaborators in moving your existing initiative forward or amplifying its impact. External advisors will help us review applications and develop the Innovator Presentation program agenda.

To apply to be an Innovator Presenter and to be sure you meet the criteria, visit: http://www.partneringforcures.org/2012/2012-innovator.php

Remember to get your application in by September 10th and we’ll see you in November!

New cross-sector deal-making tools and resources on TRAIN Central Station

by Kristin Schneeman, Program Director, FasterCures

Nonprofit foundations in our TRAIN network are perhaps more concerned than most folks about not “reinventing the wheel,” not spending time and resources learning things and making mistakes that others have already made. Financial and human capital is especially precious at these organizations, and inefficiency has significant consequences for the patients they serve. We have always featured on TRAIN Central Station resources that groups have shared with us that they feel others can benefit from having as a starting point for their own work.

We’re pleased to announce that we now have available on the site a treasure trove of new tools and resources, shared by participants in a workshop we held in June on “The Nuts and Bolts of Cross-Sector Dealmaking.” This cache includes template agreements of all sorts; due diligence guides; publications on collaborative models, venture philanthropy royalties, and charitable investing; and much more.

Among the documents and resources available are:

• The master agreement between the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute and the 15 academic institutions that are part of its consortium;

• The Chordoma Foundation’s guidelines and agreement for $10,000 prizes for the creation, validation, and deposit of new chordoma cell lines;

• “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Royalties and Their Monetization but Were Afraid to Ask,” a new publication by the law firm Schaner & Lubitz;

• A set of model legal documents for venture capital investments put together by the National Venture Capital Association, a window into the priorities of companies and investors with whom foundations may be interested in partnering.

 This is just a sampling of the more than 50 new tools and resources available. We hope you’ll find these and the others available on TRAIN Central Station useful models for your own efforts. If you have a resource, internal or external, that you would like to contribute or recommend to the community, we hope you will send it to us at train@fastercures.org!