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.
The global pandemic is forcing a pullback by advertisers on Twitter, but it’s also led to an unprecedented surge of users.
Microsoft has developed technology to help the company on its road to carbon negative by 2030. Chief Environmental Officer, Lucas Joppa, said Microsoft looks to be the blueprint for other companies to reduce their carbon footprints.
The Amal, or Hope, orbiter is the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission.
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.
Netflix added a flood of new subscribers amid the coronavirus pandemic and also offered clues to a possible successor for founding CEO Reed Hastings, who on Thursday named the company’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, as co-CEO.
The ruse discovered Wednesday included bogus tweets from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires.
Samsung is working to empower start ups across the globe to create innovative technologies that can be applied in our everyday lives. Young Sohn, corporate president and chief strategy officer at Samsung, talks newly announced winners of the extreme tech competition.
The three nations alleged Thursday that hacking group APT29, also known as Cozy Bear and believed to be part of the Russian intelligence service, is attacking academic and pharmaceutical coronavirus research institutions involved in vaccine development.
Advertising agencies are expressing concerns about the potential for TikTok to share user data with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance — something the social media platform flatly denies is happening.
The number of laid-off workers seeking unemployment benefits remained stuck at 1.3 million last week, an historically high level that indicates many companies are still cutting jobs as the viral outbreak intensifies.
