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.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Friday, Aug. 30, 2019.
According to the survey from Hub Entertainment Research, Disney+ seems to be entering U.S. households at the perfect time, as more and more viewers consider cutting the cord.
The exercise media and equipment company reported that it had made $915 million in revenues in the past fiscal year, but saw net losses of about $196 million, in its filing to go public.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2019.
Elon Musk says SpaceX will again attempt to launch its Starhopper prototype rocket around 5 p.m. ET today, 24 hours after engineers were forced to scrub the launch with one second remaining on the countdown clock.
On the back of a groundbreaking partnership with data heavyweights Deloitte and Nielsen, cannabis industry intelligence company Headset on Monday announced the launch of its real time analytics tool in the province of Alberta, marking its official debut in the Canadian market. Stakeholders anticipate the data Headset Insights generates ー first in Alberta, and eventually across all of Canada ー will serve as a road map for companies outside of cannabis looking to penetrate the industry, and for Canadian cannabis companies as the market grows more diverse and competitive.
Security startup Openpath announces office tech that will allow workers to report intruders, active shooters, or other threats directly from their mobile devices and send an emergency alert directly to an office's physical security infrastructure.
Gravy Analytics, a location-based marketing technology company, analyzed the smartphone data of people who attended the 111 solo Democratic presidential candidate events held in June and July.
Shares of Lyft ($LYFT) popped more than 3 percent Monday morning after an analyst upgraded the company, citing higher prices as a path to profitability for the ride-hail company.
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.
