Can Financial Engineering Cure Cancer?

The biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries are currently confronted with a conundrum: despite remarkable scientific breakthroughs over the past decade in our understanding of the molecular biology of disease, the financial returns to biopharma investments have been mediocre at best, and investors are withdrawing capital from this sector. Accordingly, there is a growing concern within and outside the industry that the process of translating biomedical research into effective drugs is broken. Several explanations have been proposed for this state of affairs, but the most common is that the current