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.
SIRI co-creator Babak Hodjat, now CTO of AI at Cognizant, shares insights on AI’s evolution and how Cognizant is building powerful agents for Fortune 500 firms.
A stark disagreement over regulating AI in Republicans’ tax cut and spending bill is the latest tension among conservatives about whether to let states continue to put guardrails on emerging technologies or minimize such interference.
Andrew Nusca, Editorial Director at Fortune, dives into WhatsApp’s first-ever ads rollout —and how Meta’s ad push intensifies its showdown with OpenAI.
Al Root, Associate Editor at Barron's, joins to discuss Tesla’s robotaxis going live in Texas—what it means for autonomy, safety, and the EV race ahead.
IBM Fellow Jerry Chow talks IBM’s expansion of the Quantum Data Center in Poughkeepsie, installing Heron processors that deliver utility‑scale performance.
