Cancer – Finance the Gap Between Science and Implementation
Cancer is one of the most active scientific frontiers in medicine. Discovery moves quickly—in immunotherapy, in early detection, in our understanding of cancer’s molecular drivers—but the capital that carries these breakthroughs from laboratory to clinic has not kept pace. Promising research stalls in what investors call the “valley of death,” the void between academic publication and an investable company.
A recent Cancer Basic Research Lab (see photo at the top of the article), run in partnership with Cancer Research UK and its Cancer Grand Challenges initiative, connects investors specializing in early-stage oncology with the scientific networks emerging from grand-challenge research. Discovery science often struggles to attract follow-on capital because its timelines do not align with those of most venture funds. The Lab designs financial bridges that can carry them forward.
A separate workstream with the American Cancer Society’s venture arm, BrightEdge, focuses on prevention, early detection, and diagnostics — areas where the market has chronically underinvested despite some of the highest population-health and economic returns. Rural communities face significant barriers to screening, and lower-income populations are less likely to access the technologies that catch cancer early. Closing those gaps is both a moral imperative and a precondition for any cancer strategy that works at a population scale.
Community Resilience – Financing Health Beyond the Clinic
Individual health does not exist in a vacuum. Where people live, what they breathe, whether they can access nutritious food or safe housing—these factors shape health outcomes as powerfully as any clinical intervention.
The Financial Innovations Lab’s community resilience work sits at the intersection of health, environment, housing, and economic mobility, on the premise that, properly understood, prevention is the connective tissue that holds communities together.
A 2025 Lab on community violence intervention and a 2026 Lab on protecting communities against wildfire devastation produced market-based recommendations to ensure healthier communities. A resulting report, Insuring a Better Future: Innovative Financing for Resilient Communities, will be published this summer.
Resilient communities—where housing, care, and economic opportunity work together—are, in the most practical sense, investable communities.
Pandemic Resilience – Financing the Systems We Hope Not to Need
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of the global infrastructure for detecting and responding to emerging infectious threats. Yet history reveals a recurring pattern: massive investment during a crisis, followed by a sharp decline in funding once the immediate threat fades—a cycle the World Health Organization has called “panic and neglect.”
Breaking that cycle requires capital that does not depend on a crisis to flow. Since 2020, the Financial Innovations Lab has worked to design the financing models for global early warning systems that predict, detect, and monitor potential infectious disease outbreaks before they spread. The Lab has engaged stakeholders across the investment, scientific, public health, and philanthropic communities, and has produced country-specific case studies on Brazil, Indonesia, and Kenya. In December 2024, our team presented the Lab’s findings at the Global Surveillance Summit, a side event hosted by Africa CDC and the International Society for Infectious Diseases, where governments, multilateral organizations, and private investors are now actively considering how to build the financial architecture the next pandemic will demand—before it arrives.
What Comes Next
Health is the most undercapitalized asset in the global economy. That will not stay true forever.
The architecture for a properly capitalized health system is being built in convenings where investors and scientists meet for the first time, in the term sheets of blended funds that did not exist five years ago, and in policy rooms where reimbursement reforms, social bonds, and financial incentives are slowly reshaping what is fundable. What it requires now is more partners: financial advisors aligning portfolios with purpose, institutional allocators seeking durable impact, business leaders rethinking what health means for their workforce and the communities they serve.
Visit thewomenshealthnetwork.org to learn about the catalytic fund. Explore the Milken Institute’s Catalytic Capital site and stay up to date on upcoming events. The journey toward a healthier, more resilient world is not a future ambition — it is already underway. And it needs more partners.
The future of health is ours to design and ours to build together.
Article by Théo Cohan, Milken Institute, and Yun Fu, Milken Institute
Théo Cohan is a director of catalytic capital at the Milken Institute, where she leads communications, marketing strategy, and partnerships for the Financial Innovations Lab®. In this role, Cohan works closely with cross-functional teams across the Institute to design and execute Labs that convene leaders from the public and private sectors to address complex economic, environmental, and social challenges. She is responsible for advancing the visibility and impact of the Labs’ outcomes, including developing new investment and financing vehicles, formulating policy recommendations, and fostering cross-sector collaborations to support implementation.
Prior to joining the Milken Institute, Cohan worked in development and production across the for-profit and nonprofit sectors of the entertainment industry. She holds a BFA from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
Yun Fu is an associate director at Catalytic Capital at the Milken Institute, where she works with the Financial Innovations Lab team. She contributes to the research, development, and execution of Financial Innovations Labs, which explores innovative financing models to address global social and economic challenges.
Most recently, Fu was the innovative finance principal at the Health Finance Institute (HFI), leading efforts to design blended finance solutions for health equity in LMICs. Before joining HFI, Fu had demonstrated experience in IPO filings, mergers and acquisitions, portfolio management, and coordinating international training programs. Fu holds an MBA from the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, an LLM from the George Washington University Law School, and an LLB from East China University of Political Science and Law. She is also a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder.