Posted on March 30, 2010

Three Foundations Announce $10.3 Million in Grants for Accelerated Drug Development Model

The Ewing Marion Kauffman, Robert Wood Johnson, and Scott Cook & Signe Ostby Charitable foundations have announced grants totaling nearly $10.3 million to the Myelin Repair Foundation to support a drug development model designed to get new treatments to market more quickly and at less cost.

In its research and development efforts, MRF applies a replicable process that facilitates collaboration among academic scientists, commercial biopharmaceuticals, government regulators, and patients and their families to enable the rapid delivery of treatments and cures. Through separate grants, the three foundations are not only supporting MRF's approach but also highlighting the need for a new research paradigm to bridge the gap between medical research and commercial development.

With a grant of $189,430 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, MRF will conduct two virtual crowdsourcing experiments that tap into global networks of innovators to generate ideas for more effective and efficient ways to fund and conduct medical research. The $100,000 grant from the Kauffman Foundation will help MRF develop and implement a strategy to validate discoveries made in university laboratories; to produce high-quality, commercial-ready data; and to bring additional treatment targets into the biopharma pipeline. The Scott Cook & Signe Ostby Charitable Foundation will match the Kauffman and RWJF grants as part of a $10 million challenge grant.

"What Myelin Repair Foundation is doing has changed the process by which scientific research is done in medicine to a process that is much faster and focused on producing the treatment, the cure, through open collaboration," said Scott Cook, co-founder of the Scott Cook & Signe Ostby Charitable Foundation. "This will solve not just one disease condition, but dozens and hundreds, which will change the lives of...a billion people by the time it's done."