Out of Grief, MIT’s Andrew Lo Invented a Better Way to Finance Biomedical Innovation

Andrew Lo of Massachusetts Institute of Technology lost six people he was close to, including his mother, to cancer in the span of four years about a decade ago. When he investigated what could have been done to save them he discovered that the development of cures was being held back by bottlenecks in his own specialty, finance. His effort to make things better has begun to produce results—including a $9 billion company he co-founded that is developing cures for orphan diseases.

“Finance plays a huge role, sometimes way too big a role, in how drugs get developed,” Lo said Feb. 4 in a video seminar hosted by Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton University. Fixing the financing model, he said, could have a “tremendous, tremendous impact on health care.”