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 $50 million last week to what it’s calling the “COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.” The initiative brings together life sciences companies to collaborate on the development of new vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for COVID-19.
“The Therapeutics Accelerator will enable researchers to quickly determine whether or not existing drugs have a potential benefit against COVID-19,” Chan and Zuckerberg said in a press release. “We hope these coordinated efforts will help stop the spread of COVID-19 as well as provide shared, reusable strategies to respond to future pandemics.”
The two donations are the largest from tech billionaires since the coronavirus outbreak. Wellcome and Mastercard are supporting the effort as well.
The goal of the initiative is to either develop a new drug or adapt an existing treatment that it could help distribute alongside partnering pharmaceutical companies.
The 15 companies participating in the project kicked off the effort by sharing their proprietary libraries of molecular compounds that have some history of being tested with COVID-19.
The lineup includes big names in biotech such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Facebook doesn't report its latest earnings until Tuesday, but some analysts are already predicting a drop in the numbers amid security concerns and waning popularity among the platform's younger users. Chris Versace, chief investment officer at Tematica Research, predicted on Cheddar Monday that its quarterly earnings report will put Facebook ($FB) at $1.47 per share, down from $1.59 last year.
Hershey's ($HSY) has unveiled a deal to promote its latest candy creation, a combination Hershey-Reese's bar, with the help of two of esports' biggest names: DrLupo and Ninja. Cheddar was at TwitchCon in San Jose, Calif. and got an early look at Hershey's first foray into esports and live-streaming from the company's head of integrated media, Charlie Chappell.
In a tacit admission that its cloud-computing division was lagging behind competitors like Amazon and Microsoft, IBM announced it would shell out $34 billion for open-source software maker Red Hat for an amount equal to almost a third of IBM's market cap.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know.
At TwitchCon 2018, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear sat down with Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg to discuss the streaming platform's explosive growth, the rise of Fortnite, and Twitch's relationship with parent company Amazon.
"Red Dead Redemption 2" hit store shelves on Friday with big ambitions. The hotly anticipated game, seven-years in the making, was met with wide acclaim, boosting stock in the game-maker, Take-Two Interactive ($TTWO), and earning comparisons to the mega-hit "Grand Theft Auto V." "Everyone loves 'Grand Theft Auto,' and they just believe that anything Rockstar [Games] can make is going to be a sure-fire hit," Peter Brown, Managing Editor for GameSpot said in an interview on Cheddar.
Next week marks 10 years since the debut of Bitcoin, and it's been a decade of both big ups and big downs. In a special episode of Cheddar's Crypto Craze, we looked at how the digital currency landscape has evolved since that fateful day in 2008.
Since Dailymotion was acquired in 2015 by French media conglomerate Vivendi, the video-sharing platform has grown its audience exponentially, according to CEO Maxime Saada. And now, the company's focus is fixed squarely on one concept: premium. "We decided to focus on premium content, premium audience, premium partner," told Cheddar Thursday.
U.S. stocks fell sharply Friday, putting the S&P on track for its worst monthly drop in 10 years. Tech stocks were among the biggest losers, with Amazon losing nearly 8 percent and Snap closing at another record low.
A regulatory crackdown on behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook is more likely than ever, according to Brian McCullough, author of "How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone."
