Our Approach
VENTURE PHILANTHROPY
Venture philanthropy provides a way for donations to work like investments and donors to be more involved by funding highly visible activities to achieve the mission of a charity or nonprofit. The RD Fund aims to deliver life-changing solutions for individuals with retinal degenerative diseases today, while also creating a pipeline of next-generation and novel therapeutic opportunities for tomorrow. The RD Fund is flexible in how it structures investments leveraging equity, debt, royalty, and/or project co-funding. All proceeds of this high-impact philanthropic vehicle are returned back to the Foundation to provide resources to further its mission.
INVESTMENT STRATEGY
RD Fund thesis is generally focused on therapeutic companies that range from nearing a pre-IND to clinically staged programs focused on inherited retinal disease (IRD) conditions and dry AMD. The Fund is geographically agnostic, and has an initial investment allocation range typically between $2M and $5M.
The RD Fund is unique in that it can leverage the full weight of the Foundation Fighting Blindness’ knowledge and resources including: natural history studies, My Retina Tracker® Registry, world-class scientific advisory board and clinical consortium. As a result, the RD Fund leverages both internal resources, and investment capital to attract additional investors and is open to using financial instruments including convertible notes, equity, fixed multiple return on investments, and/or royalties, with a preference for ground floor equity investments.
The RD Fund currently has ongoing investments in SparingVision, Nacuity Pharmaceuticals, ProQR Therapeutics, CheckedUp, Nayan Therapeutics, Vedere Bio, Stargazer Pharmaceuticals, Opus Genetics and Atsena Therapeutics.
For Donors
Every dollar directed toward this critical research comes from donors like you. In addition to providing funding, the RD Fund is unique in its ability to provide significant ongoing technical and strategic support and guidance. Your generosity makes real progress possible and pushes us toward our goals.
The RD Fund also brings other key resources to bear including the following tools:
- The Foundation Fighting Blindness My Retina Tracker® Registry – a clinical database of affected individuals with specific genotypes and phenotypes that can aid in clinical trial recruitment
- Natural history studies including ProgStar (for Stargardt disease) – designed to identify more precise ways to measure treatment effects within clinical trials and with the ability to perform custom analyses
- The Foundation Fighting Blindness Clinical Consortium – a network of clinical centers of excellence that will participate in clinical studies to help accelerate the development of treatments for inherited retinal diseases (IRDs)
- Interested in making a general donation to Foundation Fighting Blindness click here