A story drought prevented a SIB News yesterday but here is a lovely tale to end the week…
Findacure Blog – Big Lottery Funding to prove Findacure’s Social Impact Bond Idea
Alan Thomas – Living With Ataxia
Over the past year or so, the Findacure fans amongst you may have heard us mention social impact bonds, once or twice… or maybe a little more. It’s certainly not like we think about them day and night, or anything – well, not all of us.
Now the reason for Findacure ‘harping on’ about social impact bonds is that we really believe that they could be a powerful tool to incentivise clinical trials of existing generic drugs to treat rare diseases. If successful, this could deliver new treatments to patients relatively quickly and at little expense.
For the uninitiated amongst you, a social impact bond (SIB) is a financial tool designed to reward projects that deliver a benefit to society in a cost effective manner. For our rare disease SIB the mechanism is relatively simple. Findacure will use private investment to fund phase II clinical trials into a range of drug repurposing projects for rare diseases. We will select those diseases that cost the NHS a lot to manage. Successful trials should provide the NHS with much more robust evidence to prescribe the generic drug to rare disease patients off-label. This means that patients will benefit for a new and effective treatment, while the NHS will save money by treating them.
The SIB structure means that a proportion of those financial savings made by the NHS will be paid back into the SIB, allowing the initial investment to be repaid, and more research to be funded.
Simple.
Of course, the idea is sound in principle, but we wanted to prove that it could work in specific rare diseases. So, last year we applied for a Big Lottery Fund Grant to do just that.