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.
Discord, initially a popular app for in-game messaging, is launching a store with hundreds of games users can access for a monthly fee. Jason Citron, co-founder and CEO of Discord, said the company's growth is a "side effect" of gaming becoming more social.
MedMen, which just completed the largest pot-related acquisition to date in America, is preparing for the day when American drug laws catch up, said spokesman Daniel Yi.
Atari, the popular French gaming company, is now open to investments from U.S. investors through its new affiliation with with Nasdaq International. Frederic Chesnais, CEO of Atari, told Cheddar about the partnership.
Loren Padelford, Shopify vice president and general manager, had spent Wednesday morning monitoring the cannabis transactions taking place on Canadian Shopify-powered sites and said the demand was outpacing even his company's bullish forecasts.
Canada legalized recreational marijuana use on Wednesday, making it the second country to do so. Netflix stock is surging after the streaming giant added a record number of subscribers in the third quarter. Plus, Anthony Atamanuik and Adam Pally from Comedy Central's 'The President Show' join Cheddar to talk about their new special 'The Fall Of Donald Trump.'
Auction house Christie's will put up its first-ever painting created entirely by artificial intelligence. Lindsay Griffith, a specialist at Christie's, said the painting is likely to fetch as much as $10,000.
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Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and venture capital firm Initialized Capital, has partnered with 1850 Brand Coffee for the "Bold Pioneer" content where people pitch their ideas to win $18,500 to jump-start their business plan. Ohanian said he's looking for entrepreneurs who are thinking outside the box and making investors "a little uncomfortable."
The video streaming service added nearly 7 million subscribers in the third quarter, far better than forecast, and said it would add nearly another 10 million to round out the year.
A day after it launched as one of two official electric scooter providers in San Francisco, Skip CEO Sanjay Dastoor said the operation has been a smooth ride so far. Dastoor told Cheddar Tuesday the company has seen a "really positive, really happy response, not just from the riders, but from the city and from the non-riders as well.”
