Feb 08, 2008

Medical Research Meets Business-Oriented Philanthropy

by Laura Starita

We have written before about how the economics of drug research and testing create incentives for pharmaceutical firms to primarily develop drugs to treat afflictions suffered by many. That leaves diseases which impact either very few or the very poor un-treatable and at the mercy of the interests of the academic research community. Even those conditions lucky enough to get research attention are not necessarily well served given the dynamic of non-productive competition at work within academic environments. Non-productive competition is the kind whereby academics compete with each other for research grants, but the nature of that competition drives behaviors, such as keeping data proprietary, that inhibits overall progress toward the common end goal.

These dynamics were interestingly explored in a New Yorker article by Jerome Groopman in the January 28th edition of the magazine. The article profiles Kathy Guisti, a Harvard Business School graduate and multiple myeloma sufferer. Guisti started the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation dedicated to funding a cure for the rare blood cancer estimated to afflict 50,000 Americans and for which there is no known cure. Philanthropists who have changed the face of a disease have certainly come before her. Their work has tended to focus on awareness raising, however. Examples include the philanthropic work of Michael Milken, who raised awareness about prostate cancer in the nineties, with the result that early screening is now standard protocol and has saved millions of lives.

Guisti’s approach is different. Less medical advocate and more venture capitalist, Guisti’s foundation uses its capital to invest in initiatives that its in-house researchers view as promising. They pay for clinical trials, for research, for conferences and patient recruiting, among other things. The foundation has also created a consortium of academic research institutes that get access to tissue samples and foundation funding, but are required to share data and publish collectively. In short, it is encouraging academic research to stop competing in inefficient ways, and start collaborating so that they can all more efficiently meet their common goal. This approach is being credited with accelerating the process by which a number of drugs and compounds have moved from testing to trial.

Nonetheless, she is not without critics. One argued that by focusing on new treatments research could overlook ways to make existing treatments more effective. Others point out that it sets an unrealistic expectation that with enough money and collective thinking Guisti can “buy a cure.” That unrealistic expectation drives business-centric behaviors that are anaethma to researchers, such as PR announcements of findings that haven’t been found at all, or that are meant to generate buzz around nothing new. These are valid concerns. Nonetheless, Guisti’s approach is an interesting model for research into ailments that have a well established research community and well-understood pathology, but limited pharma funding.

It is worth noting, however, that finding new ways to use known compounds should get more play. Dominant in any venture mindset is the idea that new is better than old. By extension, the idea that getting a group of experts to think together about a problem necessarily produces a better result that one expert having a great idea. It goes without saying that access to a larger shared resource of samples and data will provide superior opportunities for creating hypothesis and testing them—this is why the Gates Foundation requires its grantees in the HIV/AIDS field and others to share their work. But another New Yorker piece entitled “The Bakeoff”, which was published two years ago by Malcolm Gladwell, makes the argument that better results sometimes come not from the collective knowledge of many, but from the ability of one person to make a link between two previously unconnected things. This same dynamic turned a headache medicine into a heart-attack preventative. And may also bring about the cure for one of the world’s neglected diseases.