On April 29, 2015, more than 50 scientists, entrepreneurs, attorneys, and medical doctors convened at Caltech to discuss the founding of a "cancer megafund" whose purpose would be to support early-stage cancer research. The one-day workshop was sponsored in part by The Linde Institute.
MIT's Andrew Lo, who first proposed the idea of creating the megafund in 2012, welcomed the attendees to Caltech's Athenaeum and provided a vision of why such a megafund is desperately needed but is not being supplied by other entities such as large pharmaceutical firms. Richard Roll, Linde Institute Professor of Finance, and Michael Ewens, Associate Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship, led panel discussions.
Roll's panel considered business and financing structures for the fund; the panelists were Derek Brunelle, Janet Campagna, Gifford Fong, Bruce Lehmann, and Anna Makki, all of whom are well known in the financial community. Ewens's panel considered the perspectives of potential investors with panelists Vineer Bhansali, Neil Kumar, Alison Li, Tom Philipson, and Rich Wolf, each of whom is intimately familiar with the investment community.
In addition, other speakers throughout the day included Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, Mark Davis of the Caltech chemical engineering division (one of the event organizers), doctors Stephen Furman (City of Hope) and Beth Karlan (Cedars-Sinai), and Pablo Legorreta of Royalty Pharma. A luncheon discussion about technology licensing was led by Fred Farina (Caltech), Jacob Levin (UC Irvine), Emily Loughran (UCLA), and George Megaw (City of Hope).
Davis, Ewens, and Roll have continued to work on the development of the fund, with help and encouragement from Lo. They have been engaging in a wide variety of discussions with attorneys and investors, have drawn up a plan for the governance of the fund, and have compiled a database detailing the probabilities and payoffs of cancer research projects that the fund would support.