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Cure a disease, win a prize

A Cambridge-based nonprofit handed out its first awards yesterday for achievements in ALS drug development and is testing a novel way of spurring disease research.

Sena Desai Gopal

Harvard Business School student Avichai Kremer had a lot at stake when he launched Prize4Life last year. If this Cambridge-based foundation achieves its goal of finding a therapy for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Kremer would be cured.

Kremer was diagnosed with ALS—a neurodegenerative disease that leads to eventual paralysis—in 2004, two months after he began his MBA program. He co-founded Prize4Life two years later to take a different approach to funding ALS drug discovery; rather than hand out research grants up front, it will give out prizes to anyone who comes up with specific technologies needed to create new medicines, such as a rapid method to screen compounds for potential ALS drug activity. The ultimate prize, $5 million, is for the development of a life-extending drug for ALS patients.

Avichai Kremer says offering large prizes is a good way to stimulate drug development for ALS.

Yesterday, Prize4Life announced the five winners of its first set of awards. A postdoc from the University of Iowa, an Emeryville, CA-based biotechnology company and others were each awarded $15,000 for their ideas on how to find an ALS biomarker needed for early diagnosis and testing drug efficacy. The next prize of $1 million is for finding the biomarker. Prize4Life works with Innocentive, an Andover, MA-based company to administer the submissions and prizes.

Identifying roadblocks

The idea of Prize4Life began to take root when Kremer set out to learn, after his diagnosis, why the only treatment for ALS was a drug that improves survival by less than 10 percent. He knew little about biomedical research; he had worked with an Israeli defense company and was in the Israeli military before coming to Harvard. But through his Harvard contacts and his own initiative, he organized a conference in Cambridge last year for ALS researchers and pharmaceutical companies.

“We wanted to understand what exactly the private sector was missing–what obstacles we could remove so they could develop a therapy for ALS,” says Kremer, who now uses a wheelchair and speaks with difficulty.

The companies said that despite a potentially large market, they hadn’t ventured into ALS drug development because so little is known about the basic disease process. “We are stymied by our inability to explain the mechanism of the disease,” says Adrian Ivinson, director of the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair.

They also reported that they lacked a lot of the tools needed to evaluate drug candidates. So Kremer created Prize4Life to bridge the gap between basic research and drug development and foster more collaboration between academia and industry.

He modeled Prize4Life after the X Prize Foundation, which rewards people for achieving goals in space travel, biotechnology, and other fields. Kremer says large prizes have proven to be good incentives for people to achieve ambitious, technological goals. Some competitors for the X Prize spent more than what the prize was worth just for the chance to win, he adds.

Scientists pitch in

Prize4Life’s scientific advisory board, which includes top ALS researchers from Harvard, determined the challenges. It also helps pick the winners. Kremer brought the scientists together through his determination and focus. “He is a doer,” says Ivinson, who agreed to join the effort because of Kremer’s impressive drive and because the foundation’s goals matched his own research interests.

Whether Prize4Life, which relies on donations from private individuals, succeeds remains to be seen. The main criticism is that it does not provide any money up front to competitors, so interested researchers lacking in funds may not be able to participate.

“It is easy to point out potential problems in new funding mechanisms like Prize4Life,” says Jamie Heywood, CEO and founder of the ALS Therapy Development Institute in Cambridge. “But the truth is the rate of drug discovery has gone down while investment in it has gone up in the last 20 years, so we need to try new models of funding for accelerating drug discovery.”

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    Jeff Huang said:

    Great concept. It would be even better if they can extend the prize to finding a cure or major drug for any disease. At the moment it might be more appropriate to call it Prize4ALS.

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