Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have donated $25 million through their foundation to a philanthropic effort organized by Bill Gates to explore new coronavirus treatments.
The Gates Foundation donated $50 million last week to what it’s calling the “COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.” The initiative brings together life sciences companies to collaborate on the development of new vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for COVID-19.
“The Therapeutics Accelerator will enable researchers to quickly determine whether or not existing drugs have a potential benefit against COVID-19,” Chan and Zuckerberg said in a press release. “We hope these coordinated efforts will help stop the spread of COVID-19 as well as provide shared, reusable strategies to respond to future pandemics.”
The two donations are the largest from tech billionaires since the coronavirus outbreak. Wellcome and Mastercard are supporting the effort as well.
The goal of the initiative is to either develop a new drug or adapt an existing treatment that it could help distribute alongside partnering pharmaceutical companies.
The 15 companies participating in the project kicked off the effort by sharing their proprietary libraries of molecular compounds that have some history of being tested with COVID-19.
The lineup includes big names in biotech such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
SpaceX is resolving toilet spills in its capsules before it launches another crew for NASA. Liftoff is currently set for early Sunday from Florida's Kennedy Space Center.
Last spring, as false claims about vaccine safety threatened to undermine the world's response to COVID-19, researchers at Facebook found they could reduce vaccine misinformation by tweaking how vaccine posts show up on users' newsfeeds.
A report in the New York Times published Sunday called 'Inside Amazon's Worst Human Resources Problem' details the company mishandling paid and unpaid leave for some of its workers for more than a year and a half, following an email sent to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos from a new mother who works at a warehouse in Oklahoma, which then led to an internal investigation at Amazon. Seattle tech correspondent for the New York Times Karen Weise joined Cheddar News' Closing Bell to talk about her report and what the Amazon investigation found.
Facebook the company is losing control of Facebook the product — and of the carefully crafted image it’s spent over a decade selling despite problems like misinformation, human trafficking, and pervasive extremist groups on its platform.
Microsoft says the same Russia-backed hackers responsible for the 2020 SolarWinds breach continue to attack the global supply chain and have been targeting cloud service resellers and others.
Record electric vehicle sales last summer amid a shortage of computer chips and other materials propelled Tesla Inc. to the biggest quarterly net earnings in its history.
For nearly a decade, bitcoin evangelists have sought SEC approval for a bitcoin-linked exchange-traded fund (ETF) in order to attract more investors into the crypto space.
Netflix has posted sharply higher third-quarter earnings thanks to a stronger slate of titles. Those include “Squid Game,” the dystopian show from South Korea that the company says became its biggest-ever TV show.
China says its launch of a new spacecraft was merely a test to see whether the vehicle could be re-used.
Facebook says it plans to hire 10,000 workers in the European Union over the next five years to work on a new computing platform.
