A conference of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering
In collaboration with the National Cancer Institute
and with the participation of the American Cancer Society
Support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is gratefully acknowledged
June 16-18, 2013
Cambridge, MA
CanceRx was an invitation-only conference that focused exclusively on new approaches to commercializing biomedical research in oncology through financial engineering. Bringing together representatives from key stakeholder communities—including academia and medical research centers, community hospitals, the biopharma industry, health plans, government agencies, patient advocacy groups, investment banks, hedge funds, credit rating agencies, biotech venture capitalists, and institutional and retail investors—the conference was organized into six sessions, each focusing on a specific aspect of the conference theme:
- Scientific and Engineering Challenges
- New Business Models
- Financing Structure, Marketing, and Investor Concerns
- Government, Healthcare Reform, and Non-Profits
- Technology Licensing and Intellectual Property Issues
- Credit Models and Debt Rating
To make the conference as productive as possible, we created working groups, comprised of individuals with domain-specific expertise, for each of the sessions. These groups convened prior to the conference and were tasked with the goal of identifying the most significant challenges within their session topic and providing potential solutions to be presented at the conference and vetted by the broader set of conference participants.
Conference Steering Committee: David B. Agus, University of Southern California; Edward Benz, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Douglas A. Dachille, First Principles Capital Management; Joseph Dear, CalPERS; Jacob Goldfield, private investor; H. Robert Horvitz, MIT; Robert Langer, MIT; Pablo Legorreta, Royalty Pharma; Frank McCormick, University of California, San Francisco; Robert C. Merton, MIT Sloan School of Management; Lita Nelsen, MIT Technology Licensing Office; Larry Norton, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; John Seffrin, American Cancer Society; Bruce Stillman, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Marty Tenenbaum, Cancer Commons; Thomas Tombrello, Caltech.