Here is a chapter from Health Care Investing, which couples strategies for making money on the future growth of the health-care industry with insightful coverage of the people and events that have shaped it. You will find valuable information about the issues health care professionals face today; examinations of patterns, policies, and future predictions in the market; and practical approaches to investing in pharma, biotech, and managed care.

Why healthcare finance? -- From the laboratory to the patient -- Present value relations -- Evaluating business opportunities -- Valuing bonds -- Valuing stocks -- Portfolio management and the cost of capital -- Therapeutic development and clinical trials -- Decision trees and real options -- Monte Carlo simulation -- Healthcare analytics -- Biotech venture capital -- Securitizing biomedical assets -- Pricing, value, and ethics -- Epilogue : a case study pf royalty pharma.

This invaluable book tells the reader how to invest in the healthcare biotechnology and life sciences sector, one of the fast-growing sectors of the US economy. Aimed at biotech investors as well as bioentrepreneurs and venture capitalists, it has been written from the perspectives of risk management and asset management/allocation. It strives to teach readers how to fish, rather than giving them fish. The author has over ten years of Wall Street experience in biotech research, investment banking and asset management. He holds an MBA in Finance and a PhD in Biochemistry.

Preserving the Promise: Improving the Culture of Biotech Investment critically examines why most biotech startups fail, as they emerge from universities into an ecosystem that inhibits rather than encourages innovation. This "Valley of Death" squanders our public investments in medical research and with them, the promise of longer and healthier lives. The authors explicate the Translation Gap faced by early stage biotech companies, the result of problematic technology transfer and investment practices, and provide specific prescriptions for improving translation of important discoveries into safe and effective therapies. In Preserving the Promise, Dessain and Fishman build on their collective experience as company founders, healthcare investor (Fishman) and physician/scientist (Dessain). The book offers a forward-looking, critical analysis of "conventional wisdom" that encumbers commercialization practices. It exposes the self-defeating habits of drug development in the Valley of Death, that waste money and extinguish innovative technologies through distorted financial incentives. - Explains why translation of biotech discovery into medicine succeeds so infrequently that it's been dubbed the Valley of Death - Uncovers specific decision-making strategies that more effectively align incentives, improving clinical and financial outcomes for investors, inventor/entrepreneurs, and patients - Examines the critical, early stages of commercialization, where technology transfer offices and Angels act as gatekeepers to development, and where tension between short-term financial and long-term clinical aspirations sinks important technologies - Deconstructs the forces driving biotech, recasts them in a proven conceptual framework, and offers practical guidance for making the system better

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Politicians consistently wage high-profile battles over prescription drugs and the companies that make them. The dilemma is balancing the pharmaceutical industry's need to make a profit with the public's need for affordable medical care. This book presents analyses of the federal government's regulation of the drug industry and the arguments over the prices of prescription drugs.

Perceptions that the pace of new-drug development has slowed and that the pharmaceutical industry is highly profitable have sparked concerns that significant problems loom for future drug development. This Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study-prepared at the request of the Senate Majority Leader-reviews basic facts about the drug industry's recent spending on research and development (R&D) and its output of new drugs. The study also examines issues relating to the costs of R&D, the federal government's role in pharmaceutical research, the performance of the pharmaceutical industry in developing innovative drugs, and the role of expected profits in private firms' decisions about investing in drug R&D. In keeping with CBO's mandate to provide objective, impartial analysis, the study makes no recommendations. David H. Austin prepared this report under the supervision of Joseph Kile and David Moore. Colin Baker provided valuable consultation...