On the front page of today's San Diego Union-Tribune, the Foundation is featured as the leader of a growing trend known as venture philanthropy.  Nonprofits and patient advocacy groups fund research in the biotech industry to aggressively advance the search for new therapies for rare diseases. 

The Foundation has invested more than $300 million in drug discovery and development over the past decade, the story notes.

“We really changed the paradigm of early drug discovery for orphan diseases,” Robert J. Beall, Ph.D., president and CEO of the Foundation says in the article.