Can portfolio speculation save lives?

<p>NEW YORK (Reuters) With U.S. biomedical research underneath attack by everybody from patients to Congress for branch so few systematic discoveries into treatments, a heading financial consultant says decisions about what studies to stake should be done a same proceed grant funds, mutual funds, and university endowments confirm how to deposit their money.
Those decisions should be guided by financial portfolio theory, argues a paper published Wednesday in a scholarship biography PLoS ONE. Applying portfolio theory to how a National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocates a $30 billion annual bill could cut a sum years of life mislaid by patients by anywhere from 28 percent to 89 percent, a researchers calculate.
We need a horizon for determining how to make allocations for biomedical investigate that is transparent, objective, receptive and reproducible, Andrew Lo of a MIT Sloan Schools Laboratory for Financial Engineering pronounced in an interview. L...