Meet BIF-4 Storyteller B-Debi Brooks: Medical Research Agent

Posted by Chris Flanagan on June 27, 2008

Benjamin Franklin said if you don’t watch your workers, you might as well leave a bag of money in their midst and walk away. Applying this principle of oversight to a group of scientists from esteemed institutions is surprisingly unconventional,. And that's exactly what Debi Brooks, co-founder of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research is trying to do.

Brooks will be a storyteller at our upcoming BIF-4 Summit in October where she'll talk about the "shockingly unmonitored" medical research funding process and the new model MJFF has created during the past eight years, positioning itself as a “strategic intermediary” between science and its funders — private philanthropists as well as industry — in an urgent effort to find a cure for Parkinson's disease.

Since its creation in 2000, MJFF has funded $120 million in research on a disease that experts think will take a billion dollars to cure. In the process, the foundation has become a critical thought leader and action driver for the entire Parkinson’s field. Its involvement in a given PD research project or undertaking has become a ‘stamp of approval’ that other investors use as a factor in their own funding decisions.

Pace, Brooks realized early on, is crucial. The foundation uses an accelerated grant system to make award decisions within two months of receiving research proposals. The duration of a typical award is two years, and MJFF money is significant — most awards are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some programs offer multi-million-dollar funding.

But arguably even more importantly than speed and award size, scientists are held accountable for the money MJFF invests in their research. Every award is milestone-based and every awardee is required to meet with the foundation at the midway point to report on progress. In the Foundation’s early days scientists balked at this requirement, but they soon began to see the benefit of sharing their work with peers and getting constructive feedback while their work was in progress.

“The more conventional funding approach is to write the check and walk away, hoping your awardee does what they’ve promised to do with your money. We didn’t like that status quo. We wanted to understand the productivity of our capital, and if a project stalled we wanted to know why. Was it a need for more money? A flaw in the hypothesis? How could we help get the work back on track? Or was it time to abandon that project and go another way?” ~Debi Brooks

Of course the people who feel the greatest pressure to find a cure for PD are those afflicted with the disease, and the diffuse goals of science and business do not necessarily prioritize patient outcomes. MJFF’s “patient-driven capital” is directed toward a cure—a goal that confounds the logic of traditional market forces.

With the patient in mind, the foundation takes a top-down view of both research and the market. This is what Brooks calls being “in the catbird seat,” or seeing the whole process and helping shepherd the most promising ideas from one stage to the next.

“Look, we’ll never take anything over the goal line ourselves because we don’t have the expertise or the kind of capital that requires—we’re not a pharmaceutical company. Admittedly, compared to government and industry funding, our resources are a drop in the bucket. But we’re targeted and strategic in how we allocate them. That’s why we believe our model makes PD therapeutics development more efficient and ultimately will have a hand in speeding up the delivery of new treatments to patients.”

It is impossible to measure how close the foundation has come to reaching its goal of finding a cure. “The more you know, the more likely you’d be to give up,” Brooks told us. “But we’ve gotten smarter about it. We’ve kept up our tenacity and our sense of urgency and I believe we will reach the finish line.”

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