Through Advocacy and Networks, FasterCures Helps Groups Seek More Money to Step Up for Medical Progress

FasterCures, a Washington think tank that works to speed up medical progress on a host of diseases, has begun a big advocacy push to encourage Congress to boost spending vote to spend more on projects that could help researchers convert scientific discoveries into treatments.

The National Institutes of Health has asked lawmakers to pour $1-billion into such efforts, starting in with the new federal fiscal year that begins in October.

The agency made the move after the White House expressed concern aboutt the slow pace of drug development.

The cost of getting one treatment from a drug company’s lab to the pharmacist’s shelf—about $1-billion per drug, on average—has slowed the quest for new therapies.

Pharmaceutical companies, frustrated by a lack of new and profitable breakthroughs, have cut back on research in recent years, as some many promising developments in areas of science such as stem -cells science and the mapping of the human genome have not led to spurred widespread new remedies with wide applications, as many scientists had hoped.

Raising ‘Every Dollar’

Private donations have yet to fill the breach. Philanthropy for medical causes makes up runs at about 3 percent of the total dollar amount poured into research in the United States each year. The rest comes from federal agencies or from biotech and drug companies.

So far, FasterCures has not succeeded in pushing the percentage of philanthropic dollars higher, concedes Margaret A. Anderson, the organization’s executive director.

“It’s been static for the last five years,” she says. “Our groups have to fund raise for every dollar they get.”

But FasterCures has helped other groups make new connections to donors, she adds.

For example: During last year’s “Partnering for Cures” conference, which the organization presents runs each year in New York, Matthias Bowman was seated next to Cat Oyler, a senior director of emerging technologies at Johnson & Johnson, the medical- and hygiene- products company in New Brunswick, N.J.

Mr. Bowman, a board member of the International Mental Health Research Organization, in Rutherford, Calif., had placed himself at a “mental-health round table” to get ideas on how his group’s grants could best promote more research on brain diseases, such as depression and schizophrenia.

“I explained to Ms. Oyler what we’re about, and before I knew it, she told me that Johnson & Johnson would entertain making a grant with us,” Mr. Bowman says. “I had no idea that they could do something like that.”

The result is the Johnson & Johnson/International Mental Health Research Organization Rising Star award: s—two $250,000 grants, to be announced this spring, to researchers who are performing promising work.