(p. A11) “Many drug programs are suspended or not pursued at all—not because of flaws in the science but because of commercial and strategic reasons,” Mr. Milken says. Researchers screen those programs, and he calls in his partners either to fund the ideas or promote their development at other companies if the inventors make them available.
It’s a niche in the pharmaceutical world that public funding can’t fill. Mr. Milken sustains a model “where a person could just give me a five-page summary and get a meeting. Government isn’t going to fund that, but philanthropy does.” “These little companies,” he adds—“they’re not Johnson & Johnson, they’re not Novartis, they’re not Amgen. They need financial capital.”
. . .
Mr. Milken’s deals not tinged by controversy, such as his 1983 issuance of bonds to finance telecom company MCI’s long-distance network, show the same preference that shapes his philanthropy: high risk for a high reward.
. . .
A perennial struggle for Mr. Milken has been to convince regulators to share that urgency. He says drug trials generally are too rigid: “We send 19-year-olds into war zones knowing that no matter what we do, some number—greater than zero—will lose their lives or their limbs. But we tell a patient who is going to die not to try something because it could be dangerous.”
Nonetheless, the partners he’s made in his search for cures prove that imagination and activity are still scattered through the country. Discussing the coronavirus with biotech founders and Nobel Prize winners, Mr. Milken says he’s been “thrust back into the 1970s and early ’80s, where any time someone had a new idea—a new company, a passion for something—I had set aside time every day to listen.” On the day a vaccine or effective cure for Covid-19 is finally announced, Americans will owe thanks to such risk takers, who Mr. Milken says “invest in where the world is going, not where it is.”
For the full interview, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date May 1, 2020, and has the same title as the print version.)