As biomedical research at NIH faces an existential threat from the Trump administration, an entrepreneur is winning over allies for what he describes as a “simple idea” that could introduce a massive new infusion of money for innovation in medicine.
Lou Weisbach, a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a political insider, wants the federal government to issue $750 billion in bonds over six years to fund an enterprise dubbed the American Centers for Cures, and he is working to bring this issue to the White House.
Should Trump wish to call this initiative the Trump American Center for Cures, that’s definitely on the table, Weisbach says.
The idea is not new. Weisbach has been working with Richard J. Boxer, a urologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine and a member of the National Cancer Advisory Board, have been pushing for legislation to float the bond and establish the centers for close to a quarter century, getting some (but not enough) traction.
However, today, as the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency are remaking the U.S. biomedical research enterprise, support for the idea appears to be on the rise, as former skeptics and those who had been too busy to pay attention say that the plan for the American Centers for Cures warrants serious consideration.
“The response over the last three or four weeks from the medical community and the research community has been remarkable to me as somebody who’s worked on this for a long time,” Weisbach said to The Cancer Letter soon after presenting the concept at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. “People get it. People get that we haven’t gotten the job done, and not because we don’t have great people working on it, but we are in a system that doesn’t work.
“The question isn’t when should we do this or should we do this, but how can we not do this and how can we not do it now?”
A conversation with Weisbach appears in this issue.
The center Weisbach and Boxer envision isn’t about funneling more money for NIH. The American Center for Cures would be about just that—the cures and project-managing them into existence. The center’s components would be led by CEOs who would be given the tools and the latitude to accomplish what needs to be done and whose performance would be evaluated based on their ability to make the cures happen.
Here is what Weisbach wants to do with the money:
Establish 14 centers, each dedicated to a disease, to be headed by business leaders who would be given $36 billion to do with as they wish, no questions asked. Another center would be given $108 billion to cure “all remaining diseases,” including rare diseases. Finally, creating a core, a center dedicated solely to AI would also receive $108 billion.
These exceptional business leaders—Weisbach refers to them as the Steve Jobses, Tim Cooks, and Elon Musks of the world—would be expected to recruit the top scientists and utilize their expertise in “crossing the finish line” to get their respective diseases cured within six years.
And if these captains of industry fail to produce?
To borrow an expression from one reality show character, they’ll hear the words, “You’re fired.”
As dark clouds gather over NIH, Weisbach’s list of endorsements grows. One influential supporter, Steven Rosen, executive vice president and director emeritus of the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center and Beckman Research Institute, has been opening doors.
“I thought that what he was proposing was intriguing,” Rosen said to The Cancer Letter. “Obviously, it was something that was very ambitious, but the potential benefits to humanity were enormous.
Said Rosen:
And the key issue was coming up with the appropriate funding and to do it in a manner that was almost like the Manhattan Project, where you’re going to have a devoted team with a business mentality, with goals, deadlines, and the appropriate resources and metrics to follow with the ultimate goal of commercializing discoveries that would be a return on the investment from the bonds that were going to be issued to generate the revenue.
And so, I started to help him by connecting him to leaders in our world and some others I know. And I think, because of everything that’s going on nationally, it’s gotten a lot of traction and has great potential to accomplish a great deal to benefit mankind…
What draws me in is that the funding component is essential to be successful. And I do think that having a model that revolves around, uh, what I would call, um, a business mentality of, not to say that there won’t be fundamental research that’s ingrained in it, but the fact that you, you speed to discovery becomes very important, uh, to, to, uh, to make these accomplishments that’s appealing. He also has already support from both political parties at different levels. And that’s essential. And his background, historically, was aligned with the Democratic Party, and now he has connections with the Republican party as well. So, if anybody can accomplish it, Lou Weisbach can.
Another supporter, Sorena Nadaf-Rahrov, said that he agrees that the U.S. biomedical research and the healthcare system is long overdue for an overhaul. More than a liferaft, Nadaf-Rahrov describes the American Center for Cures as a way to turn this period of chaos into an opportunity to change biomedical research for the better.
Nadaf-Rahrov is the chief digital strategy and AI data innovation officer at the Cancer Center Informatics Society, abbreviated as Ci4CC.
Said Nadaf-Rahrov:
Politics aside, I get it. Resources are tight. This country is trillions of dollars in debt, but our largest expense in this country is tied to healthcare. And so, if we continue in the same direction we’ve been going for years and years and years, is there going to be any significant change? Especially with the funding rates on the decline, potentially evaporating, it would be the worst day for any patient suffering from any disease when research for their disease has gone away. I can’t even imagine.
These experiments must happen. In my opinion, for healthcare and academia and organizations like ours—and people like me who stand behind them—these are experiments we must drain in order to see if there’s a new pathway to help cancer researchers or academia. I stand solidly behind the endorsement of ACC, because I don’t see anything else out there that’s going to come in…
Putting politics aside and, and looking at this idea and saying, well, this is worth the experiment. Let’s run it. If they keep politics out of it, um, I could see this supporting healthcare in the long run. Maybe a new direction is needed. It is okay to have new ideas. It’s okay to think about out of the box. I’m all about out the box. Sometimes I’m way out of the box, but that’s where great things happen.
Ci4CC has formally endorsed the initiative.
Weisbach is the founder and former CEO of Ha-Lo, a promotional products company, and a former executive at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, an organization that was purchased by City of Hope. He was also the founding chairman of the Giving Back Fund, and chairman of the Jefferson Trust, a group comprised of the largest donors to the Democratic Party, during the Clinton Administration. For two years, he served as a judge in the White House Fellows competition during Donald Trump’s administration.
The plan
The biomedical research system is not what we would build now if we could engineer it from scratch, Weisbach.
“If we really wanted to cure people if they got sick or prevent people from getting sick, how would we go about that, if we could start from scratch?” Weisbach said. “The concept came from the fact that there’s five basic elements that any successful business or effort needs to have to be able to get the job done and be successful.”
These elements of business have never existed in biomedical research, Weisbach said.
“It’s not hard. I hate to say this—it’s not hard. It’s just something we’ve never done before,” Weisbach said. “That’s what any good business has to do to be successful. We don’t have that in cures. We just don’t. We never did. And now we’re going to have it. And that’s why we are going to be successful, because we’re putting the right pieces together.”
Weisbach said that five basic elements are required for a venture to succeed. They are:
Sufficient funding
Said Weisbach:
You have to have enough money. In the world of cures, that has never existed. When you go to an ASCO event, almost every room you walk into, it’s somebody just saying, “Hey, we need more money to do this. We need more money to do that.”
So, money’s always been an issue. So having enough centralized money to put a real business plan together to get the job done is something that you absolutely have to do. Without enough money, and without the right leadership. Without the head of Apple, you wouldn’t have an Apple phone.
All the great things that you have in the world today, you wouldn’t have. But in the world of cures and prevention, that’s never existed.
Proven, seasoned leadership
Said Weisbach:
You have to have people running individual units that have proven that—if given the right money, if given the right business model—they can get the job done. Even a job that’s extraordinarily difficult.
So, our concept is that we want to hire the best and brightest people like Otis Brawley, for example, when it comes to prostate cancer, but more often business leaders whose job it’s going to be to prevent or cure every major disease within a six-year period. And we’re going to give them the money to do so, but we’re going to let them run the business the way they want to run the business, because they’re going to be accountable.
The right business model
Said Weisbach:
You need to have a logical methodology relative to: Starting from scratch, how would I go about putting the people together? What are the people I would need in my organization to get the job done? How does AI work into this? How does data work into this? So, you need to put together the right pieces to the puzzle and the right foundation to be able to get it done.
Accountability
Said Weisbach:
Whoever’s running this organization, you now have the money. You have everything you need to be successful now you’ve got to get the job done. And so, there’s going to be an aggressive timeline relative to, on the pathway to cures and prevention, what you have to accomplish every year?
There’s got to be a business plan every year. And if you’re not getting the job done for whatever reason, you’re going to have to be accountable. And what does accountability mean? It means the same accountability that if you were working for a public company and you weren’t getting the job done. You would be warned, or you might lose your job, just depending on why you haven’t gotten the job done.
We think that the very least that patients and their families deserve is accountability from the research community and a real effort to once and for all, prevent and cure people from being sick…
There’s not one person in America that will lose their job in the current system if we don’t cure anything in the next 30 years. That’s just the harsh reality.
Urgency
Said Weisbach:
Nothing gets done at a major level without the people feeling pressured, and with the people who are running a business knowing that they have to get the job done in the quickest amount of time possible. But still doing things the right way.
Raising $750 billion
Where does the money come from? From the sale of $125 billion in bonds per year for six years, from the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Weisbach contends that the model will ultimately cost the government nothing. The annual interest on the $750 billion in bonds will be paid through the licensing of new compounds and drugs that are not preventative or cures to pharmaceutical companies, while the principal will be repaid by savings provided to our government by the successes in the areas of prevention and cures.
“Simplified, in the first year, the American government will spend $6 billion in the first year towards this in interest only. Twelve billion [dollars] the second year, $18 billion the third year, $24 [billion] the fourth year, $30 [billion] the fifth year, and $36 [billion] in the sixth year,” Weisbach said. “The ultimate result will be that once whatever successes we have will actually cut the federal deficit, because the amount of money that we would be saving. Just as an example, if the only thing we did was prevent or cure diabetes, the savings would be a trillion dollars plus annualized and growing, every year going forward.”
Using the sale of bonds to fund biomedical research has precedents—the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, an institute funded through a state bond issue.
Ci4CC’s Nadaf-Rahrov describes the financial plan as “somewhat safe.”
Said Nadaf-Rahrov:
Having done enough research and having seen over the years how the government has sold off bonds to start large initiatives, it is a mechanism that’s somewhat safe, in my opinion. It’s a great thing to run that experiment, actually.
It puts the least amount of burden on taxpayers.
There are some incredible organizations that would, in my opinion, bend over backwards to be part of this early upfront. Organizations that have resources that they experiments on their own. Companies like Oracle, companies like IBM, Dell, Apple.
All of them have a healthcare effort ongoing. However, they’re all working in their own silos. So, imagine these silos through this act, come together in this experiment.
How does ACC fit into the existing biomedical research ecosystem?
“Everything that we come up with that’s not curative or preventative, we’re going to license to the pharmaceutical industry, which is really exciting to the pharmaceutical industry,” Weisbach said. “It should be exciting to everybody who lives in this country, because we’re going to have, outside of the cures and preventative things we come up with, we’re going to have new drugs and new things that help people in their daily lives.”
The American Center for Cures is bringing the U.S. “exactly what you would do if this was really what you wanted to get done,” Weisbach said. “All the elements that you need to have to be successful. And it has never been done before in this country, or in any country.
Lou Weisbach
Plus, ACC intends to send a surge of money never seen before in research.
“If you just think of what the pharmaceutical industry has come forth with during the last 30 or 40 years, and now realize we’re going to be spending more money than has ever been spent at one time on research, and think about all the things that we come up with unintended, because most great pharmaceutical fines were unintended finds, like Viagra, which was supposed to be a heart medication,” Weisbach said.
The results that come from ACC will be accessible, Weisbach said.
“The results we come up with cannot be something for wealthy people only,” Weisbach said. “And so, the underlying concept of this is, is that whatever we come up with in terms of, let’s say we do come up with something that ends diabetes, just as an example, that would be owned from a technical point of view by the American public, because it’s the American public that is really financing this.
“At the end of the day, it’s the money that they provide the federal government in taxes, and so everybody would have the same entitlement to what we come up with.”
The American Center for Cures is bringing the U.S. “exactly what you would do if this was really what you wanted to get done,” Weisbach said. “All the elements that you need to have to be successful. And it has never been done before in this country, or in any country.
“And, shame on all of us at the end of the day.”
