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Medical Missionaries
Michelle Seaton
08/01/2005
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Daniel Case III was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer early in 2001 and told that he had six to 12 months to
live. Case, a successful investment banker who specialized in seeding high-tech
start-ups, decided to use his business expertise and his remaining time to put
in motion a project that, he hoped, would one day find a cure for brain cancer.
He and his brother Steve, the founder of America Online, pooled their resources
to create Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure (ABC2). They donated $3.5 million to the
Burlingame, Calif.-based organization, which has now raised a total of $12
million. While the Case family continues to be its largest donor, ABC2 has
attracted financial support from more than 1,000 individuals and
organizations.
 In much the same way that small, entrepreneurial companies
such as AOL revolutionized business practices in the 1990s, the Case brothers
hoped to energize and change the field of brain cancer research, which attracts
little government funding and is a low priority for drug companies and
researchers. In the four years since they founded ABC2, it has granted millions
to researchers working to move promising brain cancer treatments into clinical
trials. It has fostered partnerships between otherwise competing research
facilities. It persuaded Duke University researchers to screen all cancer drugs
currently in testing by pharmaceutical companies for efficacy against brain
cancer, at no charge to the drug manufacturers themselves. This will offer those
manufacturers a cost-free method to determine which drugs hold the most promise
for treating brain cancer. The companies can then begin clinical trials. This
program has helped quadruple the number of brain cancer drugs undergoing
clinical trials; the number of such drugs in animal tests is up
fivefold.
Pharmaceutical companies are not normally interested in shouldering
the cost of clinical trials for experimental drugs for brain cancer because the
patient population is so small. About 17,000 people are diagnosed each year. The
drug companies see this as an insignificant customer base, compared with the
demand they see from those afflicted with more common forms of cancer. For
example, the American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 212,000 new
cases of breast cancer this year, along with 232,000 cases of prostate cancer
and nearly 105,000 new cases of colon cancer. ABC2’s support has made trials
commercially viable for the drug companies.
TOP VIEW
People often fund medical research after they or someone they love
face a serious or terminal disease. But it is difficult to have an impact that
matches the passion and desire to help others in similar straits. Some
hard-charging entrepreneurs have succeeded with a venture philanthropy approach,
but only with an enormous investment in time and the appropriate skills and
drive. Donors need to consider carefully what skills and resources they can
provide. Helping an established organization improve its mission may be a better
way to effect change than going it alone. |
ABC2 argues that brain cancer
patients need to be fast-tracked because their disease is so much more
aggressive than many more common cancers. “If any drug can move the needle even
a few months, it’s meaningful for patients and creates excitement in the medical
community,” says John Reher, president and executive director of ABC2.
A New Generation
Although Dan Case died in June 2002, ABC2 continues to
pursue his mission with his entrepreneurial drive and style. Indeed, this
combination of an ambitious vision, aggressive salesmanship and a talent for
creating unlikely partnerships now marks a new generation of philanthropists in
the medical field. These medical venture philanthropists are increasing in
number, but they face daunting challenges that not all have overcome
successfully.
ABC2 is one of at least 40 private foundations dedicated to
fighting brain cancer, many of which were created in memory of a family member
who succumbed to the disease. “For any family, seeing a member suffer from an
illness is a life-altering event. What comes from that is a mission, a sense
that something must be done,” says Hugh Magill, senior vice president at
Chicago-based Northern Trust. Magill oversees the company’s charitable trust
business and serves on the board of several private medical foundations. He says
these families feel their mission is to fund research or to provide help and
information to other families facing a similar crisis.
Unfortunately, these
organizations often founder because they lack specific goals or because the
people staffing the foundation lack the skills to achieve those goals. For
example, a foundation set on funding research needs to make an annual request
for proposals, review them and select one or more research projects to fund. If
it fails to do so, money that could be seeding important research lies dormant.
Also, failing to disperse the minimum amount of funds required in the tax code
for charitable foundations will attract the attention of the IRS, which could
eliminate a foundation’s nonprofit, tax-exempt status. “The worst is the
realization that you have committed all of these resources and all of this
effort, but you haven’t made any impact,” Magill says. “People give because they
want to change things, and sometimes it doesn’t happen.”
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