Reporting in the Boston Globe, Todd Wallack gives some much needed attention to a new model of collaboration between nonprofit foundations and biotech companies. Specifically, the foundations are investing in companies to support early drug research. In 2000, foundations invested $7 million in biotech. But by 2007, that figure had leaped to $75 million. Why is this happening? Why would the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation announce that it will invest as much as $49 million in Epix Pharmaceuticals?

The answer is simple. In order to take a drug to market, a company needs access to capital. But capital is hard to raise from investors (usually venture capitalists) if the market for the drug is “too small,” or if there is no preliminary proof that a drug could work. So foundations have jumped into the breach, dedicating dollars to jump-start research. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation says that it has already supported the development of 30 potential drugs that otherwise would not have been pursued.

In starting Carespace, we’ve been fortunate to receive the investment support of individuals who “want their investments to have the same kind of social impact as their donations, an idea called mission-related investing,” as Michael Fitzgerald reported in The New York Times. Michael Porter’s consultancy, FSG Social Impact Advisors, estimates that mission-related investing has increased by 16.2 percent each year since 2002.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation illustrates the power of advocacy – where committed people take action, even bucking conventional wisdom about where to draw the lines between corporations and foundations. We see the same thing about to happen in the area of open dialog between people caring for loved ones.

Here are the dynamics involved:

First, directors of foundations are facing up to the fact that their own communities need a better way to communicate and share information. As we can see, their funding priority is research and advocacy, as it ought to be. To some degree, but not yet sufficiently, they are also waking to the value of dialog between their own constituencies and people caring for loved one in all the other disease- and disability-states.

Second, it’s clear that no single foundation or group of foundations is going to build and sustain a platform to empower 50,000,000+ people – to interact with each other as an influential social force, and to pool their knowledge in a precedent-setting fashion. But this is exactly what appeals to the investor who wants to blend progressive social goals with an opportunity to build a major market presence.

Technology has helped millions of people use the Internet to find information about caring for others. But caregivers have adapted to the technology, not the other way around. Just as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is championing its own cause by investing in innovative drug R&D, enlightened investors are working with our company to create something everyone says is a great idea.