So many promising medical innovations never reach their full potential as therapies or cures, languishing instead in a metaphoric place many of us in biotech know as “the Valley of Death.”
This valley represents the gap between when a scientist makes a discovery and when that work has reached the point when a pharmaceutical company will license it, or a venture capital firm will invest in it, to get it to the point to help the patients who need it.
A new idea now taking hold in academia offers the promise of a path out of the Valley of Death: Universities, whose labs are home to so many of these potentially life-changing discoveries, should raise a philanthropic endowment and use the money to fund the work of the scientists to advance their innovations. By applying the same sort of innovative, out-of-the-box thinking to our financial and philanthropic approach as we have applied in our scientific labs, universities can take major steps in bringing drugs and other therapies to market — and improving people’s lives.
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