NFL Owner Kraft Gives HBS $20 Million

“The organizational challenge of precision medicine is to get data shared amongst institutions and to figure out faster processes, better organizational structures and information sharing to get clinical trials to happen faster . . . (and) get drugs to the market faster. You’ve got to get a lot of siloed organizations working together within medicine and industry.

“A place like HBS has the convening power to bring all these disparate parties together around one goal. We’re at a point now where the pump has been primed enough that with the right efforts we could get many more therapies and diagnostics coming out much faster.” For example, with better sharing of patient information, finding possible subjects for clinical trials of new drugs would be speeded up, while currently, many planned trials never go ahead because insufficient participants can be enrolled, Hamermesh says.

ONE IN 10 HBS MBAS INTO HEALTHCARE

About 10% to 12% of HBS MBAs graduate into jobs in health care, and the precision medicine field offers rapidly expanding opportunities, Hamermesh says. Those opportunities come from health science startups, where MBAs typically work in business development, and from innovation and entrepreneurship, says Hamermesh, who teaches a course on building life-science ventures and expects the Kraft Endowment to bolster HBS’s teaching in that area and encourage more students to pursue such enterprises. The endowment will also seed the curriculum and HBS’s body of case studies with material on precision medicine and the personalized medicine industry, opening up pathways into that field for the school’s MBAs, Hamermesh says. Those interested in the usual HBS MBA health industry paths – care delivery, payment systems, insurance, IT – will also benefit from the endowment, says Cara Sterling, founding director of the HBS Health Care Initiative. “The future of precision medicine will affect all the other sectors of the industry, so it’s really important that our students have exposure to it and understand it in a meaningful way,” Sterling says.

Planning for how to use the Kraft Endowment is in the early stages, but it will support two projects already in the works, and HBS has compiled a list of possible areas to receive endowment funding. The two projects will be the Precision Trials Challenge – a contest to reduce cost and length of clinical trials, with a $50,000 first prize  – and an initiative involving crowdsourcing contests intended to identify and scale precision medicine solutions for commercial and clinical use.

POSSIBLE TARGETS FOR KRAFT ENDOWMENT FUNDING

Potential targets for the funding, according to the school, are:

• Research and case writing that “explores promising commercial and financial models that inform the agenda for convening the precision medicine community, as well as lead to curricula for MBA, Doctoral, Executive Education or online programs courses.”

• Programs and frameworks “designed to catalyze commercialization of ideas within the Harvard community, including mentorship programs, student and post-graduate fellowship programs, and field studies.”

• Initiatives that will bring together the Broad Institute, Harvard, MIT, Harvard-affiliated hospitals and other entities “to access shared infrastructure and equipment and to solicit support from appropriate government authorities.”

• Bringing doctors, scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs into the “precision medicine ecosystem.”

• Helping to incubate “promising ventures” and “match promising ideas with investors.”

• Improving access to comprehensive electronic patient records, “a critical success factor in developing individualized medical treatments.”

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