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 fallout continues over Amazon's decision to pull out of New York City. Many housing developers scooped up property in the area in anticipation of the 25,000 new employees that would have been coming to town. So what does that mean for the future of real estate in Long Island City? Amy Plitt from Curbed NY talked to Cheddar about how it will impact everything from rents to sidewalks.
While nearly every mid- to large-sized bank rushed to announce blockchain trials and experiments three years ago — only to conclude that they couldn’t find a useful application for the emerging technology — JPMorgan Chase has found its business case: payments.
Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Strategies and former campaign manager of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, knows exactly why Amazon's HQ2 plans in New York City fell apart. "It's not that we didn't get it because of some geopolitical economic trend or something out of our control. We didn't get it because our own politicians and Amazon themselves were too incompetent and too arrogant and too tone deaf to get it right," Tusk told Cheddar.
Amazon's blog post announcing it will pull the plug on its New York City headquarters is nothing but a bluff to bring politicians back to the negotiating table, said D.A. Davidson Analyst Tom Forte. "Absolutely Amazon's bluffing," Forte told Cheddar Friday.
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.
Wham-O, a company best known for mass-marketing iconic toys like the hula hoop and Frisbee, manufactures most of its toys in China. But only now that has chosen to branch out into e-bikes does the company anticipate feeling the sting of the ongoing trade war. "To date, it hasn't really affected us that much," Wham-O President Todd Richards told Cheddar. "Now with this new technology and this new product, we foresee a little bit of a cost impact."
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Friday, Feb, 15, 2019.
A Nashville councilwoman called Amazon's abrupt cancelation of plans to build a campus in New York City "disheartening" on Thursday, saying it sends a negative signal about the company's willingness to work with local officials. "It seems like the politicians up there and the local elected officials started asking tough questions, and that's what elected officials are supposed to do ー we're supposed to be stewards of the taxpayer dollars," Councilwoman Kathleen Murphy told Cheddar.
Despite tumbling shares post-earnings and the loss of a longtime executive, SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie is bullish on the future, saying independence from big tech backing could prove to be an advantage in an increasingly competitive market.
Amazon's decision to pull its new HQ2 out of New York City is very bad for the city ー and a sign that the home of Wall Street is falling victim to anti-business attitudes, according to former CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Puzder. "I think it's a hit to the New York economy. New York is a big city, it's a strong city, but it used to be the home to capitalism. Now it's coming under some of these socialist policies and it's going to lose companies like Amazon ($AMZN)," Puzder told Cheddar on Thursday.
