The Myra and Robert Kraft Family Foundation was established in 2016 creating an initiative to to bring together an alliance between the Harvard Business School with the Broad Institute of MIT, as well as Harvard, reported Harvard Business School. Many initially were curious to why they reached out to Harvard’s business school as opposed to the medical school, but it’s because they need to put a better business plan and approach into play, with the intent of developing and delivering treatments with more efficiently.
The Kraft family donated $20 million back in 2016 to launch and promote the Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator. They hope with this program, they can get rid of any faulty medical treatment development, and speed up the process successfully.
Even Richard Hamermesh, the Harvard Business School senior fellow, expressed his hesitation at first to why they approached his department. Yet, he quickly realized that they needed more structure and an analytical approach.
The mapping of human genome has been the go-to for finding FDA-approved therapies for the past 15-years, but they are quickly learning that process is not a fast enough process. Precision medicine is currently being led by oncology, and they have successfully used it as treatment for cystic fibrosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Much of the work needed to be done is locating efficient organizations with high-performance that use precision medicine. Finding those organizations and having them on-board for a collaboration will make a huge difference. Bringing together aggressive leaders is exactly what they want and need at this point. Right now, the Kraft organization is keeping track of clinical trials for Pancreatic cancer, multiple myeloma, and glioblastoma.
The Kraft foundation is looking at a direct-to-patient approach, as well as using data and analytics to get the answers they need. This might include a stronger social media presence for awareness, improvement on consumer experience, more clinical trials and ultimately, more investments to fund all these studies and efforts.
Adding these angles altogether with precision medicine is what Kraft believes to be necessary. In September they plan to launch an education program that instills their methods into other organizations for precision medicine.
