FasterCures joins NEWDIGS Initiative at MIT as a Strategic Partner

Eric NormanFoCUS, News

Collaboration to drive innovation across healthcare ecosystem

CAMBRIDGE, MA, 21 SEPTEMBER 2018–FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute devoted to saving lives by speeding up and improving the medical research system, has joined the NEWDIGS initiative at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Biomedical Innovation as a strategic partner.

NEWDIGS provides its multi-stakeholder community of members and collaborators with a safe haven, pre-competitive environment, programs, and tools to design and pilot system-level innovations that advance sustainable, patient-centered innovation.

“This partnership with NEWDIGS at MIT means FasterCures will have an even stronger potential to bring the best science and medicine to bear on unmet medical challenges,” said Tanisha Carino, Executive Director of FasterCures. “Through our collaboration, we can help design a modern healthcare innovation ecosystem, disrupting today’s siloed and sequential system that makes much-needed therapies inaccessible to patients.”

FasterCures will participate in two major NEWDIGS projects: Financing and Reimbursement of Cures in the US (FoCUS) and the new Learning Ecosystems Accelerator for Patient-Centered, Sustainable Innovation (LEAPS) project.

FoCUS is developing strategies to ensure that durable and potentially curative therapies, often with high up-front costs, are accessible to patients and affordable to payers, while maintaining the incentives required to ensure the sustainability of innovation for the healthcare system.

LEAPS focuses on enhancing the value of biopharmaceutical innovation for all stakeholders through novel approaches to the planning, production, and use of evidence across research and development (R&D) and care delivery for a target disease. The first LEAPS pilot will demonstrate such a connected learning system for rheumatoid arthritis and will leverage Massachusetts as a statewide testbed.

FasterCures shares NEWDIGS’s fundamental principles, making them a valuable addition to our community” said Gigi Hirsch, M.D., Executive Director of the initiative. “Their focus on the patient perspective and their belief that all the stakeholders must collaborate to innovate effectively in this complex and dynamic environment align well with our mission. They will be powerful allies in our work to help the healthcare system catch up with biomedical science, and improve patients’ lives.”

About FasterCures
FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute, is driven by a singular goal: to save lives by speeding up and improving the medical research system. It focuses on cutting through the roadblocks that slow medical progress by spurring cross-sector collaboration, cultivating a culture of innovation, and engaging patients as partners. FasterCures works across sectors and diseases to accelerate the process by which great advances in science and technology turn into meaningful medical solutions for patients. For more information, visit www.fastercures.org

About NEWDIGS
The NEWDrug Development ParadIGmS(NEWDIGS) Initiative, led by the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation, is an international “think and do tank” dedicated to delivering more value faster to patients, in ways that work for all stakeholders. NEWDIGS designs, evaluates and initiates advancements that are too complex and cross-cutting to be addressed by a single organization or market sector. Its members include global leaders from patient advocacy, payer organizations, biopharmaceutical companies, regulatory agencies, clinical care, academic research, and investment firms. For more information, visit http://newdigs.mit.edu.

Contact
Deborah Young
Operations Director
+1 617 324 7756
debyoung@mit.edu

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