Founder and CEO of US online social media and social networking service Facebook Mark Zuckerberg. Photo by KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images/FILE)
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.
Elon Musk’s X has reached a tentative settlement with former employees of the company then known as Twitter who’d sued for $500 million in severance pay.
Small-scale solar panels about the size of a door are poised to be plugged into more U.S. homes and apartments as homeowners and renters who want to harness the sun’s energy look for cheaper alternatives to rooftop installations.
Rebecca Bellan, Senior Reporter at TechCrunch, dives into ChatGPT’s GPT‑5 release—what’s new, what’s controversial, and why this model could change the game.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says he’s “always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards” after coming under pressure following President Donald Trump’s call for him to resign.
A new federal rule would make it easier for companies to use drones over longer distances out of sight of the operator without having to go through a cumbersome waiver process.
Nintendo, the Japanese video game maker behind the Super Mario and Pokemon franchises, is reporting an 18.6% surge in net profit for the first fiscal quarter
