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.
With just nine months until California implements the strictest data privacy law in the nation, the vast majority of businesses operating in the state are not compliance ready, a new report found.
There's a phenomenon on the internet called the "Streisand Effect," whereby a person's attempt to suppress information ends up widely publicizing that very same information. It was named after a situation an incident when Barbra Streisand tried to keep images of her Malibu mansion off the web and inadvertently drew massive amounts of attention to it. And it's why Devin Nunes' mom was trending on Twitter Tuesday morning.
Snap Inc. plans to announce its long-rumored gaming platform for developers next month. The mobile game platform, internally codenamed “Project Cognac,” will feature a handful of games from outside developers designed to work specifically in the Snapchat app.
Editor's Note: On Wednesday afternoon, Cheddar Business erroneously reported that a Circle executive had left the company. A company spokesperson has confirmed that the executive remains an employee of Circle. Cheddar Business regrets the error.
A recent independent valuation of Tinder commissioned by parent company Match Group has placed the dating app's value at roughly $10 billion, an astounding increase from a $3 billion valuation less than two years ago that has potential ramifications for an explosive lawsuit against the company.
Elon Musk may be going to Vegas. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has recommended that The Boring Company be chosen to construct a "people mover" below the expanding convention center.
The mercurial and Twitter-obsessed Tesla ($TSLA) CEO changed his handle overnight to "Elon Tusk" with an elephant emoji, and tweeted that there would be "some Tesla news" coming at 2 p.m. on Thursday.
Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel isn't one to typically tease future products, but he did hint that Snapchat has bigger ambitions for e-commerce during a talk at a conference on Monday. Snapchat has "pretty cool products coming on the e-commerce side that we’re excited about," Spiegel said onstage at Morgan Stanley's Tech, Media, and Telecom industry conference in San Francisco.
After packing up its plans to open a new campus in New York City, is it possible Amazon will cross the river and set up shop in Newark, N.J.? That city is holding out hope that Amazon's exodus from New York doesn't mean that it's done expanding in the region. Aisha Glover, president and CEO of the Newark Alliance, told Cheddar on Tuesday that her job is to "gently nudge them and remind them that Newark is still there."
SoundCloud, the German streaming service that was on the brink of collapse before a financial rescue in 2017, is doubling down as a platform for creators with a new service that will allow artists to upload and push their content to all of the major streaming providers, including Apple, Spotify, and Amazon. SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor told Cheddar it's an "exciting and natural addition" to SoundCloud's value proposition as a place where artists go to distribute their music.
