The Business Model To Support Innovation And Access To New Therapies

By Suresh Kumar

The late evening jog in Cambridge turned out to be more instructive and thought-provoking than I could have imagined. The unconsciously chosen path took me from the biotech labs of Novartis and Pfizer through the Broad Institute and the MIT campus, across the Charles River straddling Cambridge and Boston to Mass General Hospital (MGH). World-class universities and hospitals, cutting-edge commercial research centers, and collaborative institutions were nestled in close proximity to each other. Almost everything needed to bring innovative drugs, services, and procedures to market was in one place: from cells and cultures to clinicians and hospitals, and from technologies that mesh deep computing and chemistry to venture and private capital. This ecosystem is the Silicon Valley of biomedicine. I have no doubts in its ability to discover, create, and bring new solutions to improve patients’ lives, and neither do others; the Cambridge-Boston corridor has attracted over $7BN in innovative equity capital on top of $3BN from venture capitalists.