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.
Teens whose families earn $30,000 or less a year are more likely to rely on Facebook for homework help than their wealthier peers, according to Pew Research Center study. This shows how students who may have less access to resources, "use Facebook to kind of get ahead," says Hanna Kozlowska, a reporter at Quartz.
Jessica Rolph, the co-founder and CEO of Lovevery, a subscription service for children's toys and books, says her company was borne out of her wish "meet my child where they were." The subscription service sends boxes every other month with age-appropriate items to help new parents and their babies get through those early, clumsy years.
The SEC has subpoenaed Tesla over CEO Elon Musk's tweets to take the company private, according to multiple media reports. John Reed Stark, President of John Reed Stark Consulting, and a former SEC enforcement attorney told Cheddar that there’s not enough information at this point to tell whether or not Musk intended to drive up the stock price by tweeting last week that he wanted to take Tesla private.
WOW! ー Wide Open West ー is a video, internet, and phone company that is a "challenger brand for every market," says the CEO Teresa Elder. Available in about 20 markets in the American South and Midwest, WOW! recently announced a content deal with Cheddar.
These are the headlines you Need2Know for Wednesday, Aug. 15.
Saudi Arabia's interest in funding a buyout of Tesla shareholders is far from certain, said Maureen Farrell of the Wall Street Journal. But it's unclear, she told Cheddar, if the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund would have the capital to secure such a deal for the electric carmaker's CEO, Elon Musk.
As users disengage with social media, advertisers would be wise to shift their focus to mobile games, where consumers may be more receptive, says Adam Cohen-Aslatei, vice president of marketing at Jun Group. "People report being more focused, relaxed and more engaged in a mobile game as compared to people on social media," Cohen-Aslatei says.
Disabling location history on your phone isn't enough to stop Google from tracking your whereabouts, the Associated Press revealed. To ensure your location is not being saved, Wired magazine's Emily Dreyfuss tells you how to turn off "web and app activity" tracking in your Google account.
As students prepare to go back to school, Google introduces new ways for parents to monitor their children's screen time and use mobile devices as learning resources. LaToya Drake, a Google spokesperson and media outreach lead, discusses the company's new tools and what students and educators are searching for online as they return to the classroom.
An investor with a sizable short position in Tesla said Elon Musk's most recent statement on taking the company private "was almost a confession that he committed securities fraud." The investor, Will Chamberlain, is part of a class-action lawsuit alleging the Tesla CEO didn't have sufficient basis for saying he'd take the company private at $420 a share. Chamberlain's lawyer, Reed Kathrein, says it's "pretty clear funding was not secured" before Musk's original tweet announcing his intentions.
