Tjan highlights venture capital approach to research

Posted July 14, 2010

Tony Tjan, a member of our advisory board, recently wrote a blog post on the innovative field of medical research entrepreneurship. He highlights our effort to take a venture capital approach in order to improve what is currently a broken research system.

The medical research model as we know it today is broken. Why? Three words: insufficient, inefficient, and ineffective. This is both the big problem and the big opportunity for medical entrepreneurship. Today’s model is insufficient because typically 1% or less of the amount spent each year on diseases goes towards cure research, with the balance going to caring for people with the disease. Alzheimer’s, for example, costs our country hundreds of millions of dollars each year, yet we spend just one cent out of every $4.00 available towards a cure.

You can read the rest of this article, and other posts on the topic of entrepreneurship, at his Harvard Business Review Blog.