In addition to raising venture capital and launching stock offerings, Massachusetts biotech companies are increasingly turning to foundations and nonprofits dedicated to fighting diseases to support early drug research, the Boston Globe reports.

According to industry publication CenterWatch Monthly, disease-specific foundations invested roughly $75 million in the biotech industry last year, up from $7 million in 2000. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation has awarded more than $300 million over the past decade to for-profit companies such as Lexington-based Epix Pharmaceuticals, while the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation has awarded some $25 million to companies such as Biogen Idec, Genzyme Corporation, and Tolerx, all in Cambridge.

Like most disease-specific organizations, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation originally steered its research grants to academic and nonprofit researchers, but the foundation subsequently needed drug companies to start developing actual therapies to treat the disease. That proved to be a challenge, as many drug makers are less interested in developing drugs for relatively rare diseases and because most investors prefer to wait until a company can offer some preliminary evidence that it's on the right track before pouring tens of millions of dollars into a fledgling research program. So the foundation decided to jump-start the research programs themselves by awarding biotech companies grants for early, basic drug research. To date, the foundation has helped produce more than two dozen drugs.

According to disease-research advocates, once companies start showing results, they usually can raise the rest of the money needed to bring a drug to market on their own. In the case of Epix, the biotech has already used funds from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to create and analyze three-dimensional models of the defective protein that is believed to cause the disease in more than 80 percent of patients. Epix plans to use the additional foundation money to identify possible drugs that can thwart the illness.

Massachusetts Biotechnology Council president Robert Coughlin, who has a young son with cystic fibrosis, said the work is important because it gives families like his hope. "Unfortunately, cures are bought," Coughlin said. "It costs a lot of money to get ideas from the bench to the bedside."