M A NAGING
A Think Tank Seeks to Accelerate Medical Science’s Search for Cures
By Michael Anft
FIVE YEARS AGO when Josh Sommer was a freshman at Duke Univer- sity, doctors discovered a troublesome growth in his skull. They diagnosed him with chordoma, a rare disease marked by incurable tumors of the
spine and head that typically kill an affected person in seven years.
When he received the bad news, Mr.
Sommer was forced to quit school, but
he maintained his Duke ties, and for
good reason: One of the country’s leading chordoma researchers works in a
lab at Duke.
Mr. Sommer, an engineering major,
eventually learned enough microbiology
to help the researcher determine which
chordoma cell lines might be used to
find a cure. But the painstaking pace
of the work made him realize that new
treatments, if they were to be found at
all, were many, many years away.
“I realized that one person working
in the lab wasn’t going to cure the dis-
ease,” he says. “We needed to find a way
to speed up and expand the research.”
Since 2007, when he founded the non-
profit Chordoma Foundation with his
mother’s help, Mr. Sommer has raised
$1.5-million to fight the disease. But he
has needed some assistance, he says,
getting other players to help devise new
treatments.
He found it through FasterCures, a
nonprofit think tank in New York created to speed up the pace of medical
research into deadly and debilitating
experience to meet all these people
I wouldn’t meet otherwise,” says Mr.
Sommer. “FasterCures acts a bit like a
Chamber of Commerce in that they do a
lot of matchmaking and broadcasting of
best practices. They’ve been a big help
to us.”
SARA D. DAVIS/AP IMAGES
Josh Sommer, who suffers from the rare ailment chordoma, not only
started a charity but learned microbiology to help aid researchers.
diseases by strengthening connections
between the people who can make it
happen.
At annual meetings of FasterCures
the past two years, Mr. Sommer has
rubbed elbows with donors, drug-indus-try representatives, leaders of organizations with similar aims, patients, and
venture-philanthropy groups.
He has also taken part in discus-
sions about how drug companies and
research groups investigating a range
of diseases can pool their resources and
stop duplicating their efforts, with the
aim of accelerating the rate of medi-
cal discoveries and reducing the cost of
achieving them.
Through Advocacy and Networks, FasterCures Helps
Groups Seek Money to Step Up Medical Progress
FASTERCURES, a New York think tank that works to speed up medical progress on a host of
diseases, has begun a big advocacy
push to encourage Congress to boost
spending on projects that could help
researchers convert scientific discoveries into treatments.
The National Institutes of Health
has asked lawmakers to pour $1-bil-
lion into such efforts, starting in the
new federal fiscal year that begins in
October.
The agency made the move after
the White House expressed concern
about the slow pace of drug development.
The cost of getting one treatment
from a drug company’s lab to the
pharmacist’s shelf—about $1-billion
per drug, on average—has slowed the
quest for new therapies.
Pharmaceutical companies, frus-
trated by a lack of new and profitable
breakthroughs, have cut back on re-
search in recent years as many prom-
ising developments in areas of science
such as stem cells and the mapping
of the human genome have not led to
new remedies with wide applications,
as many scientists had hoped.
Raising ‘Every Dollar’
Private donations have yet to fill
the breach. Philanthropy for medical
causes makes up about 3 percent of
the total dollar amount poured into
research in the United States each
year. The rest comes from federal
agencies or from biotech and drug
companies.
So far, FasterCures has not succeeded in pushing the percentage
of philanthropic dollars higher, concedes Margaret A. Anderson, the organization’s executive director.
“It’s been static for the last five
years,” she says. “Our groups have to
fund raise for every dollar they get.”
But FasterCures has helped other
groups make new connections to donors, she adds.
For example: During last year’s
“Partnering for Cures” conference,
which the organization presents each
year in New York, Matthias Bowman
was seated next to Cat Oyler, senior
director of emerging technologies at
Johnson & Johnson, the medical- and
hygiene-products company in New
Brunswick, N.J.
Working Across Boundaries
Started in 2003 by Michael Milken
as part of the Milken Institute, an economic think tank in Santa Monica, Calif., FasterCures encourages philanthropists to take bigger risks when supporting research in the name of people
who, like Mr. Sommer, often don’t have
the time to wait for new treatments to
drip from the research pipeline.
Mr. Milken originally got involved in
working to grease the wheels of medical
science when, not long after he was released from prison following his role in
the 1980s “junk-bond” scandal, he was
diagnosed with prostate cancer. When
he started the Prostate Cancer Foundation in 1993, he streamlined the process
for getting grants to top researchers.
In starting FasterCures, he expanded that approach to support research
on a roster of diseases that affect more
than 100 million Americans, including
Alzheimer’s, cancer, and Parkinson’s,
says Margaret A. Anderson, the group’s
executive director.
With an annual budget of $3.5-mil-
lion—much of it from Mr. Milken and
a handful of foundations, including the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in
Seattle, and the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, in Princeton, N.J.—
FasterCures has devoted much of its effort to
understanding the players on the medi-cal-research scene and getting them together.
“Our original board’s idea was that
we should work across disciplines and
sectors to see how we can make organizations more efficient and better fund-ed,” says Ms. Anderson. “Because we
don’t represent one particular patient
group, we can play a strong role in coming up with solutions across the sector
without facing the pressures they’re facing. There are a lot of passionate, smart
people who want to cut through what’s
holding them back, and we try to help
them.”
Broader Collaboration
FasterCures does not make grants to
groups working to develop new therapies. Instead, according to those who
have benefited, its main role is as a networker. By bringing together various
groups involved in the search for new
treatments—patient groups, pharmaceutical companies, prospective donors,
research scientists, and venture philanthropists—FasterCures encourages
them to take the financial and strategic
risks involved in developing those treatments.
“For a long time, people who have had
success financially have written checks
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