How Dr. Mona Jhaveri’s Underfunded Ovarian Cancer Treatment Inspired a Career One-Eighty
Dr. Mona Jhaveri provides a living example of how to turn adversity into success. After a lack of funding required her to shutter her biotech company, she pivoted to helping other researchers keep their own doors open. Toward this end, she founded the groundbreaking nonprofit Music Beats Cancer, which crowdfunds donations for cancer-fighting technologies through the power of music and community.
In this way, Dr. Jhaveri has turned her own dark days into new hope for millions.
The precarious life of life-saving research
“The greatest barrier to fighting cancer is the lack of funding for scientists’ research and development,” Dr. Jhaveri says. She should know — she has experienced these difficulties herself.
During her career as an academic researcher, Dr. Jhaveri discovered a promising new treatment for ovarian cancer — one of the deadliest forms of cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, “Ovarian cancer ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women, accounting for more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system. A woman’s risk of getting ovarian cancer during her lifetime is about 1 in 78. Her lifetime chance of dying from ovarian cancer is about 1 in 108.”
Despite the fact that Dr. Jhaveri’s startup was working to improve survival rates, little funding was available to keep her research going. “Biotech startups are like every other kind of startup,” she explains. “Securing adequate financing is a problem for any new venture.”
Unlike other startups, however, cancer-fighting biotechs have a life-saving mission. “I went into business because I had an idea that would help the world,” Dr. Jhaveri says. “Most other biotech founders in this field have the same motivation. Maybe they have an idea for a new treatment; maybe it’s a better way to diagnose a patient’s condition, or a way to prevent disease. For all these projects, however, one thing is the same: the purpose is to improve people’s health and save their lives.”
Too little funding
When funding issues forced Dr. Jhaveri to close her lab, she realized that helping researchers acquire financing was the most significant contribution she could make in the fight against cancer. “Under our current system, most cancer-fighting innovations fail to secure funding,” she says. “In the biotech industry, this funding bottleneck is affectionately termed the ‘Valley of Death,’ where great ideas go to die because they lack the requisite funding.”
In this context, the Valley of Death is the struggle biotechs face in their efforts to bring a cancer-fighting innovation to market. Too few resources are available, forcing a majority of these fledgling startups to close. Due to this funding gap, too many worthy ideas for treating, diagnosing, monitoring, and preventing cancer are not developed for the patients who need them.
Unwilling to let this state of affairs continue, Dr. Jhaveri founded Music Beats Cancer in 2012.
A bridge across the ‘Valley of Death’
Music Beats Cancer’s mission is to increase the number of cancer-fighting ideas in the product development pipeline. The organization’s approach is charitable crowdfunding which enables startup founders to raise a round of non-dilutive funds to help “de-risk” their innovations in hopes of attracting downstream funding from institutional investors.
Biotechs represented on the Music Beats Cancer platform create charitable online campaigns, complete with a write-up about the technology and its urgency in the fight against cancer, as well as a compelling video to hook the crowd. Each campaign lists a specific dollar amount for a goal, as well as an itemized description of the use of funds, offering donors a direct and transparent way of donating to a cancer-fighting innovation that they find important and worthy. This is a departure from traditional charities that hold events like galas, 5ks, or marathons where monies raised are not clearly directed, wherein the donor is not aware of how or where their dollar was spent and if anything good came from it.
In addition, Music Beats Cancer relies on independent artists to help raise awareness and funds through fundraising challenges, livestream tributes, and live events around the country. “Musicians are critical to growing a movement of change in the war on cancer,” Dr. Jhaveri remarks. “Funds raised by musicians serve to match those donated by the crowd and jumpstart crowdfunding campaigns.”
The power of crowdfunding
Traditionally, funding for cancer-fighting innovations has only been sourced through scientific grants and investors. But with the inception of Music Beats Cancer, people everywhere now have the ability to support these critical innovations.
Music Beats Cancer hopes to establish itself as an important source of alternative/non-dilutive funding for cancer-fighting startups’ research and development. Dr. Jhaveri and her team also see themselves becoming the go-to charity for people who wish to see meaningful change in the war on cancer.
“More people contract cancer every year,” Dr. Jhaveri says. “We need a solution that’s big enough to encompass the scope of the problem. That’s why I started Music Beats Cancer.”