In this article, I describe my approach to dealing with the challenges and opportunities of synchronous online teaching during the Fall semester of 2020 in the specific context of a 90-student graduate course in healthcare finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management

The portfolio approach of financing drug development has been proposed as a financial innovation to improve the risk/return tradeoff of investment in drug development projects through the use of diversification and securitization. By investing in a sizable and well-diversified portfolio of novel...

We define long shots as investment projects with four features: (1) low probabilities of success; (2) long gestation lags before any cash flows are realized; (3) large required up-front investments; and (4) very large payoffs (relative to initial investment) in the unlikely event of success....

We apply machine-learning techniques to predict drug approvals using drug-development and clinical-trial data from 2003 to 2015 involving several thousand drug-indication pairs with over 140 features across 15 disease groups. To deal with missing data, we use imputation methods that allow us to...

The biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries are facing significant challenges to their existing business models because of expiring drug patents, declining risk tolerance of venture capitalists and other investors, and increasing complexity in translational medicine. In response to these...

Typical value-at-risk (VaR) calculations involve the probabilities of extreme dollar losses, based on the statistical distributions of market prices. Such quantities do not account for the fact that the same dollar loss can have two very different economic valuations, depending on business...

Using survey data gathered from grantees of the non-profit Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF), we investigated the commercial and non-commercial impact of their research funding. We found significant impact in both domains. Commercially, 19.5% of BCRF grantees filed patents, 35.9% had a...

Advances in biomedical research have created significant opportunities to bring to market a new generation of therapeutics. However, early-stage assets often face a dearth of funding, as they have a high risk of failure and significant development costs. Historically, this has been particularly...

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a rare genetic disorder affecting thousands of individuals, mainly young males, worldwide. Currently, the disease has no cure, and is fatal in all cases. Advances in our understanding of the disease and innovations in basic science have recently allowed...

Current business models have struggled to support early-stage drug development. In this paper, we study an alternative financing model, the mega-fund structure, to fund drug discovery. We extend the framework proposed in previous studies to account for correlation between phase transitions in...