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.
Richard Allan, Facebook's vice president of public policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, answered inquiries from representatives of nine countries, sitting next to an empty chair left open for Zuckerberg. Early on, Allan, who is a former member of the British Parliament, admitted that the chief executive's absence was "not great."
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2018.
As Apple waits for a ruling from the Supreme Court, other tech companies may have cause to worry about their own legal futures. Jimmy Hoover, a legal reporter for Law360, said a ruling that favors consumers over Apple would be "an anathema to these companies."
Former wide receiver Walter Powell Jr. played for three NFL teams over a span of four years. But now, a year into his retirement, he's decided to tackle a new challenge ー creating a more informed electorate. The athlete created a new an app, Politiscope, to educate political newcomers like Powell with a tool that "broke down politics so people like me could understand it," he told Cheddar Monday.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle united with labor leaders on Monday to slam GM's announcement that it would cut more than 14,000 jobs ー a combination of factory and office roles ー and put five plants on the chopping block.
Ohio officials will allow businesses to pay taxes in Bitcoin as of this week. While limited in scope, the move represents an important tacit admission by a government body that Bitcoin is an acceptable currency, according to Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer.
Scott Cutler, SVP of Americas at eBay, told Cheddar that the trends that are changing the retail landscape became clearer this year, with mobile purchases on the day before Thanksgiving now making for the unofficial kick-off to the season. EBay expects to gross more in online transactions than Walmart, Macy's and BestBuy combined.
E-commerce and mobile was the breakout star this Thanksgiving weekend with more customers picking the couch over the queue, shopping earlier ー and increasingly on their phones. "It's not just about Black Friday anymore ー there's the day before Thanksgiving, there's Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday. Small Business Saturday was pretty big too ... It's basically a whole week at this point," Rob Marvin, associate features editor at PCMag told Cheddar on Monday.
Elon Musk says there's a 70 percent chance he'll go to Mars ー even though there's also a good chance he won't come back. Musk spoke on his plans to personally take the SpaceX Starship (formerly known as the BFR) to Mars in an interview with Axios broadcast Sunday on HBO, during which he also said that Tesla was "single-digit weeks" from dying this spring and summer.
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.
