How does a firm's market power in existing products affect its incentives to innovate? We explore this fundamental question using granular project-level and firm-level data from the pharmaceutical industry, focusing on a particular mechanism through which incumbent firms maintain their market...

We review the literature on financial intermediation in the process by which new medical therapeutics are financed, developed, and delivered. We discuss the contributing factors that lead to a key finding in the literature--underinvestment in biomedical R&D--and focus on the role that banks and...

We empirically assess the potential financial impact of future gene therapies on the US economy. After identifying 109 late-stage gene therapy clinical trials currently underway, we estimate the number of new and existing patients with corresponding diseases to be treated by these gene...

Recent outbreaks of infectious pathogens such as Zika, Ebola, and COVID-19 have underscored the need for the dependable availability of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). The cost and risk of R&D programs and uniquely unpredictable demand for EID vaccines have discouraged...

We compare and contrast the expected duration and number of infections and deaths averted among several designs for clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccine candidates, including traditional randomized clinical trials and adaptive and human challenge trials. Using epidemiological models calibrated to...

In the midst of epidemics such as COVID-19, therapeutic candidates are unlikely to be able to complete the usual multiyear clinical trial and regulatory approval process within the course of an outbreak. We apply a Bayesian adaptive patient-centered model--which minimizes the expected harm of...

A key driver in biopharmaceutical investment decisions is the probability of success of a drug development program. We estimate the probabilities of success (PoSs) of clinical trials for vaccines and other anti-infective therapeutics using 43,414 unique triplets of clinical trial, drug, and...

We analyze the financial performance of a hypothetical portfolio of 120 mRNA vaccine candidates in the preclinical stage targeting 11 emerging infectious diseases. We calibrate the simulation parameters with input from domain experts in mRNA technology and an extensive literature review. We find...

How does competition affect innovation and how it is financed in R&D-intensive firms? We study the interaction between competition, R&D investments, and the financing choices of such firms using data on biopharmaceutical firms. To motivate the empirical hypotheses, we develop a model for such...

We develop a theory of optimal financing for R&D-intensive firms that uses their unique features--large capital outlays, long gestation periods, high upside, and low probabilities of R&D success--that explains three prominent stylized facts about these firms: their relatively low use of debt,...