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.
Catching you up on what you need to know on April 25, 2022, with Secretary of State Blinken and Defense Secretary Austin visiting Ukraine, Emmanuel Macron is reelected as president of France, Twitter is talking to Elon Musk about his purchase bid, and more.
Between Bells EP Conor White recaps some of the biggest stories of the week, and teaches Baker Machado and Azia Celestino a thing or two at the same time. It's This Week in Trivia!
Chad Anderson, Managing Partner at Space Capital, explains how satellites are helping provide new information on climate change, while also discussing the latest on the space investment front and SpaceX's delayed mission.
The saga surrounding Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter has made its way to Washington, DC. A group of 18 House Republicans are calling on the social media platform's board to preserve all records and documents related to the company's response to the offer from the Tesla CEO. Caleb Silver, editor in chief of Investopedia, joined Closing Bell to discuss. "This is a long term play, but it's just a shot across the bow by congressional Republicans, who probably will end up taking the House, that they're going to be tough on Big Tech and they're going use Musk's bid for twitter to take it private, so that he can get the platform to be open source and remove its censorship."
Removing carbon from our atmosphere has become a goal for scientists and entrepreneurs around the world, and while many have begun to develop promising technology solutions, a few big names in tech, including Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey, are committing nearly $1 billion dollars to fund carbon removal technology through 2030 through a new initiative called Frontier, an advanced market commitment to incentive following through on development. Hannah Bebbington, the head of strategy for Frontier, joined Cheddar News to discuss. "What Frontier aims to do is help get this market on track by sending that strong demand signal such that we can scale up capacity really significantly in the next couple of years," she said.
