It’s expensive and risky for pharmaceutical and biotech companies to develop drug treatments, and there are often few rewards for investors. In a Nature Biotechnology paper published online last month, professor Andrew Lo and two colleagues from Sloan propose a new financial structure—a “megafund” of up to $30 billion that spreads risk among a large number of investors and supports work to transform basic research into drugs for clinical trial. Lo, director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, was named to Time magazine’s 2012 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. “We’re hoping this is going to be the beginning of a much longer and deeper conversation between financial experts and biomedical researchers,” he told the MIT News.

Explore Professor Lo’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories ab