Corner Office: Uprooting the Foundation

We have realized that the traditional funding model—one that rather passively hands out grants to promising scientists—simply was not resulting in expedient effective treatments. Too many institutional barriers were in place, too many limitations existed, and we simply could not sit around hoping someone else would tear those barriers down. We turned our funding model inside-out in order to build new mechanisms, create strategic partnerships, and foster a spirit of collaboration between the many different stakeholders inside and even outside the NF landscape: patients, researchers, clinicians, pharmaceutical companies and the biotechnology sector. And while we continue to provide grants to promising scientists for interesting research, we have rebuilt our foundation to realize optimal results. All of these choices were made with one goal in mind: to not merely activate the drug development process, but to set in motion a process that promises to get treatments (and one day a cure) into the hands of our patients.