We love to hear from our listeners. Send us a message. On this week&#x27;s episode of the Business of Biotech, Annette Bakker, Ph.D., CEO at the Children&#x27;s Tumor Foundation, and Andrew Lo, Ph.D., Finance Professor at MIT&#x27;s Sloan School of Management and Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering, talk about the methods and economics for turning abandoned drug candidates into new therapies for patients. Annette and Andrew share the story of Gomekli, a formerly shelved Pfizer drug candidate spun out into SpringWorks Therapeutics, and approved in 2025 for NF Type 1 tumors (Merck KGaA subsequently acquired SpringWorks for $3.9 billion). They also detail plans for bringing more shelved candidates back into development, using a shared data infrastructure and a matchmaking tool to pair interested drug developers with investors and funding. Access this and hundreds of episodes of the Business of Biotech videocast under the Business of Biotech tab at lifescienceleader.com. Subscribe to our monthly Business of Biotech newsletter. Get in touch with guest and topic suggestions: ben.comer@lifescienceleader.com Find Ben Comer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencomer/

A Rescue Model For Shelved Drug Candidates With Annette Bakker, Ph.D. And Andrew Lo, Ph.D. 

Business Of Biotech

Welcome back to the Business of Biotech. I'm your host, Ben Comer, Chief Editor at Life Science Leader. And today I'm speaking with Andrew Lo, Ph.D., Professor of Finance at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering.

And Annette Bakker, Ph.D., CEO at the Children's Tumor Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on accelerating the availability of treatments for neurofibromatosis and schwannomatosis, or NF, a group of rare genetic conditions that cause tumors to grow on nerves throughout the body.

I'm pleased to have Annette and Andrew on the show today to talk about a new repurposing model for identifying and developing NF treatments, a model that has already notched a big win with the approval of Gomecli for NF Type 1, a formerly shelved Pfizer drug candidate spun out into SpringWorks Therapeutics, which was in turn acquired by Merck KGAA for $3.4 billion in July of 2025.

Andrew and Annette hope to replicate the success by building a marketplace for discontinued drug assets and a shared data infrastructure and a structured matchmaking mechanism to connect asset holders, developers, and long-term capital funding. Andrew and Annette, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. It's an interesting idea and I want to get into it. But before we do, I have a couple of questions.

Just on background, Andrew, you're a finance professor at MIT. I'm interested in what caught your interest initially about repurposing discontinued drug assets. Well, that's a great question. And I ask myself that all the time. How did I get involved? Because I'm really deep into it now. It started about 15 or 20 years ago when a number of friends and family were dealing with various kinds of cancer.

A Rescue Model For Shelved Drug Candidates With Annette Bakker, Ph.D. And Andrew Lo, Ph.D.

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

A Rescue Model For Shelved Drug Candidates With Annette Bakker, Ph.D. And Andrew Lo, Ph.D.

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.