In a bid to overcome some of the commercial challenges faced by expensive new gene therapies, Quantile Health has raised $6 million for a financial platform that’s designed to spread out costs and widen access.

The company was co-founded by MIT professor Andrew Lo, whose ideas formed the intellectual foundation for the company BridgeBio, as part of his quest to change how drug development is financed.

Professor Andrew Lo proposed a $30bn cancer "megafund" a decade ago to combine drug testing projects to diversify risk. The idea had already inspired smaller-scale applications at companies such as BridgeBio and Roivant, he said. "If we can change the incentives and reduce risk, the increased reward will bring more money," Lo said.

New research published in the inaugural issue of the academic journal Collective Intelligence suggests that evolutionary forces may be fueling collective tendencies to discriminate.

New MIT research forecasts the effect of various two-dose vaccine allocation strategies on the cumulative number of infections and deaths in the U.S.—quantifying the impact of prioritizing first versus second doses. The forecasts suggest that allocating more than 50% of available doses to individuals who have not received their first dose can significantly increase the number of lives saved and significantly reduce the number of COVID-19 infections.

Retirement investors have never had it so good. For a decade now individual retirement accounts and company 401(k) plans have been booming thanks to the stock market’s giddy rise.

But before we start to get complacent, or think this is normal, here comes a timely new warning. And it comes from beyond the grave, from the late, great Vanguard founder Jack Bogle—one of the champions of the Mom and Pop investor and buy-and-hold index investing. Bogle died in 2019.

The typical life cycle of a drug from the laboratory to the clinic and, finally, to patients is long and fraught with obstacles. There is a significant bottleneck — known as the Valley of Death — when lack of funding prevents ideas from moving from the university into the market.

Andrew W. Lo is an economist by training and trade. While studying the drug discovery cycle for personal reasons, he was baffled by the concept of the Valley of Death. From the perspective of an economist, as he explains, “I always assumed that if there’s a medical need and if there’s a good rate of return for treating it, the money will flow. So, if there’s a bottleneck, it must mean that there just aren’t enough good opportunities.”

When the MIT economist Andrew Lo came up with the concept of the hub-and-spoke model for the drug industry, it was to reduce the financial risk of developing drugs for rare forms of cancer.

VIDEO: Covid-19 may be a public health crisis, but has had real impacts on the economy. MIT’s Andrew Lo discusses what’s happened and why history suggests a financial boom may be in the future.

Biotechnologies born in the labs of MIT have been given priority review more often than other, similar life sciences innovations, according to a new study published in Nature Biotechnology.

When Covid-19 hit, a lot of bullish investors looked for lessons in the previous outbreak. But the comparisons may be misleading.

MIT has debuted a new platform designed to help the enterprise decide how to invest in cybersecurity.

By securely aggregating sensitive data from cyber-attacks, the SCRAM platform from MIT CSAIL can quantify an organization’s level of security and suggest what to prioritize.