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 Fisker Ocean debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month represented a new opportunity for CEO Henrick Fisker to stake his claim in the electric vehicle industry.
The company wrote in its latest quarterly earnings report on Tuesday that it had lowered the threshold for a view to someone who watched a piece of content for at least two minutes.
Tesla's stock reached an all-time high on Wednesday when it opened at $571 per share, hoisting the company over the $100 billion market cap and making it the most valuable U.S. carmaker.
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UN experts Wednesday called for an investigation into reports that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia hacked into Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' phone via WhatsApp.
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Cruise, the autonomous-vehicle company backed by General Motors and Honda, unveiled the Origin on Tuesday which it says is the first self-driving vehicle designed from the ground-up to get from here to there without a driver.
Investors were eager to see how the company fared following the launch of Disney+ and AppleTV+ in November and in light of the upcoming launch of NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service.
CoinTracker, a startup that helps people calculate their taxes on crypto holdings, is introducing a free tier of service for users with less than 200 crypto transactions in a tax year as the IRS makes turns its attention to investors in “virtual currencies.”
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.
