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.
By all accounts, 2018’s North American Bitcoin Conference was packed. The bull market attracted more than 4,000 zealous attendees to Miami to hear the Bitcoin gospel. That January, the term “Bitcoin Billionaire” was widespread, and a tide of scheming hustlers and buttoned up institutions had infiltrated the ranks of Bitcoin’s true believers, looking for riches.
Motorola is out with its latest line of smartphones offering customers more options when it comes to budget-friendly devices. The new G7 models feature bigger screens, sharper cameras, and longer battery life. Motorola's head of product operations, Doug Michau, talked to Cheddar about the importance of low-cost options and also addressed rumors of a Razr reboot.
Airbnb announced on Thursday that airline industry veteran Fred Reid has joined the company as global head of transportation to lead an intensive push into transportation. “We’re going to explore a broad range of ideas and partnerships that can make transportation better. We haven’t settled on exactly what those will look like,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said in a statement.
Warren Bravo thinks investors will get behind his fish waste-based cannabis concept when his company, Canadian marijuana producer Green Relief, heads to the public market this year. "We are going out, we'll say, sometime this year into the IPO space," Bravo, Green Relief CEO and co-founder, told Cheddar on Wednesday, adding that he's not committed to a specific time frame.
If there's one issue on which President Trump and Congress can work together, it's infrastructure. That's according to Henry Cisneros, a veteran private equity investor and former HUD Secretary under President Bill Clinton.
Firefly is a car-top digital smart screen that benefits ridesharing drivers by giving them a new source of income ー and helps their home cities by providing them with new streams of data, the company's CEO told Cheddar.
"We placed digital smart screens on top of taxi and rideshare cars, and thereby we serve location and time-targeted outdoor advertisements, at the same time our smart screen generates a lot of smart screen data which we share back with municipalities and cities," said Firefly's co-founder and CEO Kaan Gunay.
Social media has helped fuel massive opportunity in the travel industry, but with opportunity, comes cutthroat competition, Trivago CEO Rolf Schrömgens said Wednesday. "People are really traveling in general more. They want to experience stuff, they don't want to buy stuff anymore," Schrömgens told Cheddar.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Wednesday, Feb, 6, 2019.
Abra, a five-year-old crypto company that has historically been focused on remittances, is starting to look like a fintech app itself; it will soon give users the ability to use their bitcoin to invest in traditional assets “like Apple, Amazon, gold and the S&P 500," according to a customer email it sent late Tuesday.
Amazon may have met the David to its Goliath in the epic battle for Long Island City ー provided that Gov. Cuomo doesn't stand in his way. State Sen. Michael Gianaris, who represents New York's 12th district, including Amazon's planned Long Island City outpost, said the tech giant's plan ー promising 25,000 jobs in exchange for billions in city funds ー doesn't even merit negotiation.
