In a bid to jump start drug development for rare diseases, a pair of lawmakers has introduced a bill that would allow the National Institutes of Health to establish a private investment fund. The idea is to raise $400 million from private investors and use the proceeds to develop early-stage compounds.
The NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Science would develop these compounds and then transfer them to the fund. In exchange, the agency would get a stake capped at 25 percent. The hope is to benefit taxpayers, patients, and investors, according to MIT professor Andrew Lo, who co-authored papers on which the legislation was based.
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