December 9, 2004 | Read Time: 1 minute
Michael Milken, the former junk-bond trader, has made a new name for himself in the world of cancer research, reports Fortune magazine (November 29). As founder and head of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Mr. Milken has “turned the cancer establishment upside down,” the publication says, and has helped “speed up science.”
When Mr. Milken was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1993, the magazine says, the disease was a “medical backwater” that received little attention from researchers and didn’t garner much financial support. According to Fortune, Mr. Milken quickly decided that he would start a foundation in which researchers would be encouraged to seek funds for their most “innovative and unconventional” proposals.
“The Milken model, in a nutshell, is to stimulate research by drastically cutting the wait time for grant money, to flood the field with fast cash, to fund therapy-driven ideas rather than basic science, to hold researchers he funds accountable for results, and to demand collaboration across disciplines and among institutions, private industry, and academia,” Fortune says.
Mr. Milken is influencing the way other diseases are attacked, the magazine notes. His grant-making approach has been adopted by other nonprofit groups, such as the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease, Fortune says. And Mr. Milken, whose cancer is in remission, last year founded FasterCures, a Washington think tank charged with examining and working to change “public policy and government regulations that may be holding up science,” the magazine says.
The article is available online to the magazine’s subscribers at http://fortune.com.
