Sean Parker is determined to cure cancer.
The founder of the controversial music service Napster, and founding president of Facebook, has his eyes set on a new innovation: progressing cancer immunotherapy research.
Parker said he planned to donate $250 million and create the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. The institute will focus its research on triggering “the immune system’s ability to seek out and destroy invaders”, those invaders of course being cancer cells. This type of treatment is still very new and unexplored, but gained notoriety after former President Jimmy Carter saw success in treating his melanoma with an immunotherapy drug.
The institute, rather than having it’s own team of researchers, will amalgamate 300 scientists from Memorial Sloan Kettering, Stanford Medicine, UCLA, UC San Francisco, MD Anderson and Penn. So instead of competing against one another, the other institutions will work in unison, which Parker believes will progress advancements quicker.
“Any breakthrough made at one center is immediately available to another center without any kind of IP (intellectual property) entanglements or bureaucracy,” he said.
Photo credit: Ralf Liebhold/Shutterstock