Who's funding whom?

Here's an interesting piece from FIspace on nonprofits buying rights to drug research that would otherwise languish in the 'pure' research side of the house. When academics can't interest the commercial pharmaceutical companies in bringing these breakthroughs to market groups like the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation or Myelin Repair Foundation are stepping in and using their resources to take the findings from lab to trial.

OneWorldHealth pioneered one way of doing this. The activism by 'disease-specific' nonprofits, the intersections with university offices of technology transfer, the role of federal regulators, and the market opportunities that exist for entities much smaller than the mega-pharm companies just go to show how multi-sector and multi-directional real change can be.

Tags: philanthropy, socialcapitalmarkets