NEW YORK, April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- InvestAcure, PBC announced today that founder and CEO Max Tokarsky will present a keynote address at the Alzheimer's-2018 International Conference in Rome on May 8.

According to the World Health Organization, 50 million people worldwide have dementia and Alzheimer's disease. With no available cure, it's the seventh leading cause of global deaths and the third leading cause of death in high-income countries.

The Rome conference brings together researchers from around the world focused on groundbreaking research to slow, reverse or prevent dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Max Tokarsky's keynote presentation is titled "The Enigma of Eroom's Law and The Wall Street Math Stifling Alzheimer's Drug Discovery."

As the prevalence of Alzheimer's grows, so do the costs it imposes on society. Yet, despite a significant number of drugs showing promise in animal models, progress is being stifled by a breakdown in the ROI (return on investment) model at the clinical stage of drug discovery.

For complex diseases like Alzheimer's, research progress depends on the trial and error of real-world Phase 1 & 2 clinical trials. Due to the high cost of these trials, this stage of drug discovery depends on industry-led investment. The average cost of developing a new drug, per billion U.S. dollars spent on R&D, has doubled roughly every nine years since 1950. That means, adjusted for inflation, it costs 80 times more to develop a new drug today than it did in 1950! The observation of this trend was coined Eroom's Law by industry analyst Jack Scannell in 2012, writing in "Nature Reviews Drug Discovery."

The current ROI from internal R&D in the pharmaceutical industry, as a whole, is an average of just 3.7 percent. For Alzheimer's, this model has broken down altogether, leading most major pharmaceuticals to downsize or close their Alzheimer's research divisions.

InvestAcure's Public Benefit Corporation model offers one such solution, enabling those impacted by Alzheimer's to partner in the search for a cure by rounding up day-to-day transactions and investing the spare change in clinical stage pharmaceuticals working on promising drugs. This helps transition investment leadership from a narrow group of high-risk investors to a much larger and stable investment base, leading to more clinical trials, more drugs and drug combinations tested and progress to a cure.

While spare change doesn't seem like a lot, automatically rounding up one's transaction adds up to about $50 per month on average. Twenty-six percent or 70 million adults in the U.S. alone have a relative with Alzheimer's. If just 1.5 percent become spare change investors, that's $600 million annually - $3 billion over five years. That would have 30X the impact of Bill Gates' recently publicized $100 million commitment to Alzheimer's research. At a 15 percent participation rate, the number jumps to $6 billion annually or a staggering $30 billion over five years! That's enough for countless clinical trials and a reasonable chance for a cure.

Max Tokarsky is a life-long social entrepreneur, non-profit executive and a graduate of the Wharton Entrepreneurship program. Max can be reached at mtokarsky@investacure.com. 

Related Images

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Eroom's Law  
The average cost of developing a new drug, per billion US dollars spent on R&D, has doubled roughly every nine years since 1950.

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Key Features of the InvestAcure Platform

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Impact of Spare Change Investment

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Max Tokarsky, Founder & CEO of InvestAcure

Related Links

Alzheimer's: The Shocking Truth About The Search For A Cure

Related Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w8O8ojEQPk

SOURCE InvestAcure, PBC