Alívio do IRS é maior para 17% das famílias

[VirtuaGod]

O problema é que curar doenças não dá lucro o que importa é que fiquem crónicas. É um drug service.

[BearManBull]

O caminho para a cura do cancro está na nanotech. Não sei porque continuam a bater na mesma tecla das drogas convencionais.

A tecnologia é exequível e o grande obstáculo vai sendo a falta de financiamento.

As vantagens são enormes é não invasivo, potencialmente sem qualquer efeito secundário e permite efectuar o tratamento antes mesmo de qualquer sintoma aparecer.

Claro que isto ainda é muita ficção mas há bases fortes que levam a crer que é um alternativa viável.

O problema é que curar doenças não dá lucro o que importa é que fiquem crónicas. É um drug service.

link:

http://nano.cancer.gov/learn/understand ... ourney.asp[/i]

[urukai]

Aqui fica um artigo muito interessante sobre um paper de um Hedge Fund Manager publicado na Nature recentemente.

Andrew W. Lo, the MIT finance professor and hedge fund manager, wants to bring Wall Street-style financial­ engineering to a crucial social need: curing cancer.

Named this year as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, Lo runs an investment firm in Cambridge called AlphaSimplex Group, with $3 billion in assets. He is known for his “adaptive markets” financial theory, which maintains that prices and investors are not always rational.

Now he is proposing an idea that would go beyond his own firm, creating a “megafund” that would flood early-stage research in cancer drugs with $30 billion. By supporting as many as 150 experimental compounds at any one time and bringing in large numbers of investors, he argues, the risk would be spread over a much larger base.

Even if just a few of the treatments prove effective, Lo estimates the fund would be profitable, earning equity investors annual returns of 7 to 10 percent.

“Only with massive scale can you reduce the risk of this early-stage research,’’ said Lo, who pitched his megafund idea in a paper published Sunday in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

“Finance is a means to an end. It’s a way to allow us to collaborate on problems of unprecedented scale,” he said.

Typically research on cancer cures — already now into the billions of dollars — is funded by the government and private companies. But it’s a high-risk proposition. It takes about $200 million just to get a new medicine to the point it can be tested in humans, Lo said. Even then, most trials end with disappointing results.

Only about half of the treatments that make it to final testing are submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for approval, said Kenneth I. Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development in Boston. Getting to that point takes about 8½ years, he said.

“Promising research that could potentially lead to new products is not being pursued, simply because of a lack of funding,’’ said Kaitin, who thinks Lo’s idea could be effective.

Lo is not planning to run the new fund, though he is looking to help build a team to manage it.

His own performance has in some periods beaten a hedge fund index but has often trailed the broader market. So far this year, his ASG Global Alternatives Fund is up 2.5 percent, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index has gained 16.4 percent.

The firm says its approach is to hedge against big drops in the market, so it won’t fare as well during a market surge.

Since its start in September 2008, the fund has gained 1.7 percent on average per year, compared to a 0.2 percent gain for a composite index of hedge funds compiled by Hedge Fund Research Inc.

Several mutual funds that Lo’s firm manages, however, have had mediocre performances.

Still, the 52-year-old Lo is widely recognized, including by Time, for his Darwinian view of the markets, in which he applies evolutionary and neurobiological models to risk and finance. He is director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering.

Born in Hong Kong and raised in New York City, Lo lost his mother last year to lung cancer. He, like many people, also has watched friends and colleagues struggle with the disease in its various forms.

As an economist, he said, “I felt pretty helpless.’’

So he decided to focus on an area where he could have an impact: funding sources for cancer research.

In his Nature Biotechnology paper, Lo calls the current business model for drug research and development flawed, noting that the number of drug applications per dollar of spending is declining, and pharmaceutical stocks as a group have fared poorly over the past decade.

Under Lo’s proposal, the oncology fund could pour money into more speculative, early-stage research in exchange for a percentage of future royalties or proceeds from sales of intellectual property. A successful cancer drug can generate $2 billion a year in revenue, he said.

Josh Bekenstein, a managing director at the Boston investment firm Bain Capital and chairman of the board at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said he would welcome any effort that puts more money into finding cancer cures.

“It’s a struggle every day to try to fund the promising research that will save lives. All of us would love more money to be available,’’ he said.

Perhaps the best comparison to the kind of fund Lo envisions is a drug-royalty investment group such as Royalty Pharma Inc. in New York, which buys future interests in later-stage experimental drugs. But Lo wants to target drugs earlier in the research cycle, when the outcomes are also more uncertain.

Part of his plan is to use the kind of the complex financial instruments that became notorious during the financial crisis.

He suggested creating a new kind of investment instrument: “research-backed obligations,” or RSOs, using a mix of equities and debt securities to spread risk, maximize capital, and generate different levels of returns.

The debt securities, in particular, could attract investments from endowments, foundations, pension plans, and other large investors with the deep pockets needed to bankroll such a massive venture.

Mark T. Williams, who teaches finance and risk management at Boston University, said Lo’s complex model for spreading risk has pluses and minuses:

“The vehicle could reduce the downside, but would it be attractive enough to investors?” Williams asked. “You also cap the potential upside.”

Lo is planning a conference next year to which he will invite scientists, investment managers, venture capitalists, and large institutional investors to discuss the practical details of the megafund in greather depth.

“I’ve shown that when you actually look at the numbers, when you look at the financing, you can actually do a lot of good,’’ Lo said. “The cancer folks don’t understand this stuff. Because they’re trying to cure cancer.”

Aqui fica o link do artigo.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/09/30/mit-professor-andrew-proposes-cancer-megafund-billion-speed-cures/iHLdtvRa0ZfqH9FuxjQ7mJ/story.html?s_campaign=sm_tw

Quanto ao paper, têm de ter subscrição na Nature.

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nbt.2374.html

Entretanto, já têm aqui uma opinião com algumas reservas relativamente a esta securization. (que, não querendo cometer uma gaffe, esteve por detrás da bolha imobiliária do crash de 2007/2008!)

Three researchers from MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, including Andrew Lo, have an intriguing new paper in Nature Biotechnology. They start off by noting that pharmaceutical companies are doing a very bad job at turning R&D expenditures into profits, and suggest an alternative: special-purpose “megafunds” of between $5 billion and $15 billion, which issue debt and equity securities, and then use the proceeds to invest in a diversified portfolio of a couple of hundred biomedical R&D projects.

There are a number of good ideas in here. First is the simple benefits of diversification. A $200 million research project with a 5% chance of success is a gamble. But if you bundle up 50 such research projects, even if there are some pretty strong correlations between them, your probability of success becomes much higher. You won’t make 60 times your initial investment, of course, as you would if you just invested in one project and it worked out. But investors tend to prefer safety to risk: they’re generally happier with a very high chance of getting a 10% return than they are with a very low chance of a 10X return.

On top of that, when researchers are working hard on a project which is going nowhere, there are often many institutional forces at play which keep that project going for longer than makes economic sense. If those researchers are part of a megafund which is developing some much more promising therapies, by contrast, they might be quite eager to move over to one of those teams. Especially when 15% of the profits from any given drug are set aside for the team which developed it.

And for all that the pharmaceutical industry has doubled its R&D spending over the past decade, from $68 billion in 2002 to $127 billion in 2010, there’s now a 20-year backlog of oncology compounds waiting to be investigated, and record numbers of medical and life-sciences PhDs who would love to be able to do those investigations.

Finally, the model of having a pharmaceutical company which funds itself with equity and debt and then which devotes some portion of its cash to R&D — that model doesn’t seem to be working very well these days:

The trend of increasing complexity and risk implies that the traditional financing vehicles of private and public equity are becoming less effective for funding biopharma because the needs and expectations of limited partners and shareholders are becoming less aligned with the new realities of biomedical innovation. The traditional quarterly earnings cycle, real-time pricing, and dispersed ownership of public equities imply constant scrutiny of corporate performance from many different types of shareholders, all pushing senior management toward projects and strategies with clearer and more immediate payoffs, and away from more speculative but potentially transformative science and translational research.

The translational part of the pipeline seems to be especially underfunded these days: while $22 billion was spent on basic research in 2010 and $125 billion was spent on clinical development, less than $7 billion was spent on the “translational efforts” which transform the former into the latter — something the Milken Institute calls “the translational valley of death”. That’s always been an area which appeals more to venture capital than to established pharmaceutical companies, but even the venture capitalists these days are concentrating more on later-stage drug development, not least because the sums of money needed to fund a wide range of translational projects, most of which will fail, are so enormous. Venture capital is all about return on investment, and the up-front investment needed in the biomedical space has been rising steadily, even as it has been falling sharply in technology. You can get monster returns on much lower investments in tech than you can in medicine.

So, what are the MIT people proposing? Basically, a special-purpose vehicle which would act as a “preclinical incubator” for early-stage projects and then shepherd them through to final approval, generating cash along the way by selling assets, if it needed to, to pay creditors. The vehicle would be funded by a mixture of equity and debt: the simple model in the paper has $15 billion in total capital, comprising $6 billion of senior debt yielding 5%, $3 billion of junior debt yielding 8%, and $6 billion of equity. If everything went according to plan, the senior and junior debt would get paid off in full, and the equity would ultimately realize annualized returns in the low double digits. Not exactly a home run, but still a decent uncorrelated long-term return.

The authors see this as a great time to try this kind of thing, because interest rates are so low that bonds yielding 5% and 8% respectively look incredibly attractive, especially if they’re uncorrelated to broader fixed-income risks surrounding the nexus of banks and sovereigns. What’s more, with “venture philanthropy” very trendy these days, it’s possible that the fund could raise a lot of money from foundations which want to invest their money in a way which could help ultimately provide the world with great new drugs which will save millions of lives. Some foundations might even step in to provide a guarantee on the megafund’s debt, which would bring the yields down substantially and allow it to raise even more money up front.

Still, I’m very skeptical that this idea is going to see the light of day, and the main reason is the sheer scale needed. In finance, as in most other areas of life, people want to start off small, and see if something works, before they scale up and go big. And this model, in particular, involves a whole new asset class — or, really, a whole new set of asset classes. Investors don’t like putting billions of dollars into something untried and untested, especially in a world where the returns to R&D spending have been declining steadily for many years.

It’s possible that the problem with R&D returns is a function of constraints that public companies have, and venture capitalists have, but which megafunds wouldn’t have. It’s possible — but it’s far from certain. And there has to be a pretty good chance that a brand-new megafund, making all the mistakes that a brand-new anything makes, will see zero or negative returns on its first go-round.

On top of that, the MIT model has both the senior and the junior bonds paying out coupons from day one, with the senior bonds repaying all their principal in years 3-4, and the junior bonds repaying their principal in years 5-6. That’s a lot of money to pay out in a relatively short amount of time, given that it takes a good 10 years for a drug to go from initial development through to approval. As a result, I fear that the megafund would be forced to sell its prime assets while they were still young, giving the biggest returns to the buyers of the assets rather than to the shareholders in the fund. And then there’s the wind-up date: the fund would have to liquidate after a certain amount of time, no matter how well it was doing, and no matter how crappy the market was for its assets that particular year.

There would also be very little alignment of interests between bondholders and equity holders in the megafund: the shareholders would want to hold on to everything, while the bondholders would want much more conservatism.

It seems to me that the permanent-capital model of a pharmaceutical company with an R&D department is actually better suited to the purpose than a megafund would be. Its “preclinical incubator” can be a permanent thing, rather than just lasting for a few years before being wound down. It can issue highly-rated unsecured debt on the strength of its cashflows from current drugs, and it can spend as much time and money as it takes to develop drugs, rather than being forced to sell half-baked projects at an inopportune time.

And while I’m sure that the MIT researchers did the best simulations they could with their “historical oncology drug-development databases with over 700 compounds in various stages of preclinical and clinical development from 1990 to 2011″, I have very little faith that the past performance of drug-development dollars between 1990 and 2011 is a particularly good guide to what one might expect going forwards. After all, there were two big spikes in biotech returns over that period, the larger one being the dot-com bubble. Since 2001, returns have barely been positive, and I’d love to see the results of the simulations if they used just 2001-2011 data rather than 1990-2011.

returns.tiff

In short, while there might be a certain amount of interest out there for a modest initial attempt at this kind of thing, the fact is that a modest initial attempt wouldn’t be good enough. In a world where a successful drug needs over $1 billion in development costs before it comes to market, and where 95% of bright ideas eventually fizzle out and die, a megafund really would need to be mega-sized in order for the diversification benefits to really kick in. And while Andrew Lo is a very good salesman, I don’t think even he could raise $15 billion or $30 billion for this, or any other, experiment.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/10/01/can-securitization-save-medical-rd/