[1] Conceived while James Heywood was moving cross country in March 1999 to be with his family, ALS TDI became the world's first non-profit biotechnology company and pioneered a new model for accelerating translational research by directly hiring scientists to develop treatments outside of the academic and for-profit corporate architecture.
The culmination of this work is a paper published in the journal "Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis"[5] that identified crucial errors present in many existing preclinical studies that could lead to false positive results.
Stephen Heywood died in the fall of 2006 when his ventilator accidentally disconnected shortly before ALS TDI began a comprehensive program to use industrial discovery approaches to understand the disease.
[6] In August 2007, after serving as ALS TDI's CEO for nine years and having raised $50m in funding, Heywood stepped down and joined the Institute's board of directors.
[8] Currently Heywood serves as chairman of PatientsLikeMe and is focused on developing a broad patient-centered platform that improves medical care and accelerates the research process by measuring the value of treatments and interventions in the real world.