Vaccines are more likely to get through clinical trials than any other type of drug — but have been given relatively little pharmaceutical industry support during the last two decades, according to a new study by MIT scholars.

Over a two-decade span from January 2000 to January 2020, private-sector vaccine-development efforts succeeded in bringing a drug to market 39.6 percent of the time, the researchers found. By contrast, programs to develop anti-infective therapeutics — medicines that lessen the severity of illness, including antibiotics — succeeded 16.3 percent of the time.

“The probability of success for vaccines is reliably higher than for any other drug development area,” says MIT economist Andrew Lo, co-author of a new paper detailing the study.

Vaccines are more likely to get through clinical trials than other types of drugs, but vaccine development for some of the world’s most dangerous diseases has lagged in recent decades, which may present challenges for the pursuit of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new MIT study.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have published a pair of studies in a COVID-19 special issue of the Harvard Data Science Review, freely available via open access, describing new methods for accelerating drug approvals during pandemics and for providing more accurate measures of the probabilities of success for clinical trials of vaccines and other anti-infective therapies.

"Randomized clinical trials - where patients are assigned randomly to two groups, one receiving a new treatment and the other receiving a placebo or reference treatment - are the gold standard for determining the safety and effectiveness of a treatment," says Andrew Lo, Ph.D., the study's senior author and the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "Only when the treatment group shows significant improvement over the control group, will regulators approve the therapy." He adds, "the current process is designed to protect the public by minimizing the chances of "false positives" (approving ineffective and unsafe therapies), and by and large, it's been very successful."

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have published a pair of studies in a COVID-19 special issue of the Harvard Data Science Review, freely available via open access, describing new methods for accelerating drug approvals during pandemics and for providing more accurate measures of the probabilities of success for clinical trials of vaccines and other anti-infective therapies.

A study emerging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and published in the Harvard Data Science Review has detailed strategies for accelerating the regular pace of regulatory approvals in order to create a faster access route to essential treatments and prophylactics during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have published a pair of studies in a COVID-19 special issue of the Harvard Data Science Review, freely available via open access, describing new methods for accelerating drug approvals during pandemics and for providing more accurate measures of the probabilities of success for clinical trials of vaccines and other anti-infective therapies.

How important is it for endowments to have a chief investment officer? Not very, according to new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Illinois.

The study, which examined characteristics linked to higher returns at nonprofit endowment funds, found no “systematic evidence” that funds with dedicated CIOs perform any better than endowments without dedicated CIOs. Furthermore, compensation for CIOs was found unrelated to returns, according to authors Andrew Lo and Egor Matveyev of MIT and Stefan Zeume, a business school professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

For Jim Simons, history is repeating itself, at least when it comes to meltdowns in the quant fund world. Computer models at Renaissance Technologies, the firm founded by the mathematician and former codebreaker, misfired when volatility surged this year, contributing to a first-quarter loss at its largest hedge fund. The beta models, which help determine portfolio exposure at funds for outside investors, “in recent volatile markets have not performed as expected,” Renaissance said in a March 30 filing.

As gene-based vaccines are being designed and tested at unprecedented speeds to fight COVID-19, scientists wonder if this will be the technology’s make-or-break moment.

This is an abridged version of an MIT Sloan School of Management lecture delivered online by Prof. Andrew W. Lo to students in his 15.481 class "Financial Market Dynamics and Human Behavior" on March 31, 2020.

The finance faculty from the MIT Sloan School of Management have today sent an open letter to Congress supporting a stimulus package that focuses on combating the coronoavirus pandemic directly, as well as helping economically vulnerable households and small businesses. The MIT professors also said that unrestricted cash injection into large corporations would be a “grave mistake”.

“Bailouts of large firms mainly benefit large investors who are not as economically vulnerable and should understand the risks of investing in stocks and other corporate securities in the first place,” the letter states. “The fact that the 2017 corporate tax cut has led to a dramatic increase in share buybacks suggests that any similar cash injection into large corporations would mostly benefit large investors. In addition, large firms are much stronger financially.

Watch the MIT Industrial Liaison Program with professors Yossi Sheffi, Alex Pentland, and Andrew Lo for a special webinar highlighting the impacts of COVID-19 on business.

Topics include:
* What should firms be doing with their supply chain now?
* Who is most at risk in your organization? What should firms be doing to prevent catastrophic spread of the virus inside their organizations?
* What do executives need to be watching now in financial markets?

Andrew W. Lo's presentation slides available HERE

See overview and agenda on the MIT ILP website

Clark Kent was a mild-mannered reporter; Peter Parker, a lonely high school student. They were the perfect disguise for their alternate selves, Superman and Spider-Man, allowing them to evade attention when they weren’t saving the world.

So, who will save the financial services industry from Covid-19? Andrew Lo, the MIT finance professor, suggests another unlikely hero – quants. Their superpower, he argues, is the ability to act as a bridge between the world of science and the world of finance.

Andrew W. Lo, Ph.D., Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT Sloan School of Management, believes the biggest barrier, from an investor perspective, are new business models. “That, to me, is the one thing that we can be thinking about differently that we aren’t right now. People are already focused on scientific collaborations, new types of biological mechanisms and targets, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and all the other -omics. But the one omics they haven’t focused on is economics, new ways of structuring biopharma businesses and financing them. This challenge also offers tremendous opportunities for applying the tools of modern financial engineering to biomedicine and getting investors to think differently…. By adopting a portfolio approach to biomedical R&D, we can lower the cost of capital, increase the amount of funding, and get new and better therapies to patients faster and cheaper.”

LAFAYETTE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Journal Of Investment Management (JOIM) and New Frontier Advisors LLC today announced the winners of the 2019 Harry M. Markowitz Award. The winners are finalized by a Special Selection Panel comprised of Nobel Prize Laureates.

The Markowitz Award is sponsored jointly by JOIM and New Frontier Advisors and recognizes the seminal and transcendent impact of Dr. Markowitz’s work as a financial economist and mathematician on both theoretical finance and the practice of asset management. The award was established to honor his legacy and to support future research and innovation in practical asset management. Candidates for the annual award are chosen from among papers published in JOIM in a calendar year. An honorarium of $10,000 is bestowed for the winning paper. Two additional finalist papers receive a Special Distinction Award along with a $5,000 honorarium.

2019 Markowitz Award Winners

This year’s top recognition was awarded to “Funding Long Shots,” by John Hull, Professor of Derivatives and Risk Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Andrew W. Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Roger M. Stein, Adjunct Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.