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Health care and medical research may attract considerable philanthropic dollars from wealthy individuals, yet many givers question whether their dollars have an impact.

Morgan Stanley unearthed this concern as part of a firm-wide effort to help their clients make better decisions “on where and how they are giving their money away,” says Melanie Schnoll Begun, the bank’s head of philanthropy management.

“In this space of health care, and advancing medical philanthropy and specifically, cures, the reality is that nine-and-a-half out of 10 clients we spoke to were disappointed,” Schnoll Begun says. “They weren’t seeing and aren’t seeing the discoveries and cures that they are funding coming to fruition.”

Health care is the third most popular giving category among individuals with a net worth of at least $1 million, according to Bank of America’s 2018 Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy, conducted by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

A push to get more cures out of the lab and into drugs that can help patients across a range of diseases is gaining ground among health care givers, notably at FasterCures, a center of The Milken Institute focused on quickening the pace of medical research and cures. As the institute points out, there are treatments today for only 500 of the 10,000 known diseases in the world.

To address this gap, Morgan Stanley is making it possible for its clients to direct charitable dollars within the Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust (GIFT)’s donor-advised fund to the Harrington Discovery Institute (HDI) at University Hospitals in Cleveland, which exists to push medical science and drug discoveries made in the U.S. and the U.K. toward commercial cures.

Morgan Stanley GIFT is a nonprofit independent of the bank that oversees a donor-advised fund, among other projects.

Through Morgan Stanley GIFT Cures, as this effort is called, “clients who already may be giving to medical philanthropy could compliment their giving and be part of this donor community,” Schnoll Begun says. The approach will allow them to learn alongside other donors, and the medical community, about the state of science development across a number of diseases, ranging from Alzheimer’s, to heart disease, diabetes, and cancers, as well as rare and infectious diseases.

The point is “to create transparency about what’s happening with the money going to medical philanthropy,” she says.

The Harrington Institute, which has about $330 million in funding to date, was founded in 2012 with $50 million by medical supply company entrepreneur Ron Harrington and his family. The institute selects research to support through an open source competitive process, where they look for projects that are focusing on a discovery with the most scientific promise to be a cure, and for projects that have commercial potential, Schnoll Begun says.

Counted among HDI’s successes is OptiKira, a privately held biotechnology company, which last year created a drug with potential to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a rare condition that causes blindness. OptiKira grew out of the work of two physician scientists that HDI had funded, and was initially formed by BioMotiv, a for-profit company created under the umbrella of the Harrington Project for Discovery and Development (which also oversees HDI).

Morgan Stanley clients interested in supporting HDI’s work can make a donation through the GIFT donor-advised fund. For gifts of $1 million or more, they can support research into a disease that’s not part of the GIFT Cures portfolio. These givers will be provided with technical and consulting expertise to target the disease or to support the progression of the specific therapy they care about, Schnoll Begun says.

In both cases, Morgan Stanley expects the Cures program will help donors “understand they can de-risk the development of drugs” so the philanthropic capital they are providing “will be seeding discovery to the point that pharma, venture capitalists, and industry say: wow, they really have something there and it’s worth commercializing,” she says.