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.
Contactless payments company Square has seen its clients forced to adapt to social distancing and stay-at-home orders with new technology.
Nikola motors goes public after developing zero emissions hydrogen and battery electric powered semi-trucks. A fleet of Nikola trucks are set to be manufactured in 2021 out of Germany.
Facebook employees are using Twitter to register their frustration over CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to leave up posts by President Donald Trump that suggested protesters in Minneapolis could be shot.
A growing number of writers, performers, musicians, and podcasters who have turned to fan-direct services such as Patreon, Substack, and OnlyFans to make a living. This trend has only been amplified under quarantine, as media consumption has increased dramatically worldwide.
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.
Autotune was a staple in pop hits throughout the 2000s. T-Pain, Nelly, Daft Punk, and almost every major pop artist embraced the technology. But most of these famous tunes were actually using Autotune incorrectly. So who started this trend and how did something so despised become so popular?
WarnerMedia's streaming service, which launched on Wednesday with 10,000 hours of content for $15 a month, now exists in a world no analyst could have predicted.
Max Simkoff, CEO and founder of States Title talked to Cheddar about the acceleration of digital dealmaking in the mortgage industry, which had been slow to adopt measures before the pandemic.
Wall Street’s rally ran out of fuel in the last hour of trading on Thursday, and the market fell to its first loss in four days amid worries about rising U.S.-China tensions.
President Donald Trump is escalating his war on social media companies, preparing to sign an executive order Thursday challenging the liability protections that have served as a bedrock for unfettered speech on the internet.
