Scientists adapted Wall Street financial risk models to predict exactly when tuberculosis patients are going 'biologically bankrupt.'
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
A structural Merton jump-diffusion framework for survival analysis: Modeling biological solvency and distance-to-death(DtD) in tuberculosis
bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.03.30.715204
The Takeaway
By treating a patient's body mass index as 'financial capital' and health crises as 'market shocks,' researchers used quantitative finance math to predict mortality. This represents a genuine first in applying 'distance-to-default' logic to human survival in infectious disease.
From the abstract
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a leading cause of death globally, with early mortality often driven by severe malnutrition and human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) co-infection. Traditional survival analyses identify risk factors but remain associative, failing to capture the dynamic physiological collapse preceding death. In a novel interdisciplinary adaptation, we applied the Merton jump-diffusion structural framework from quantitative finance to model survival as a state of biological solvency, in