Facebook co-founder Sean Parker to invest $250 million to cure cancer
Despite a four-decade war against cancer and over $150 billion in research investment, five-year survival rates are virtually unchanged from 20 years ago in most types of cancer. In 2014, more than 1.6 million Americans were diagnosed, and close to 600,000 died from cancer. By 2030, cancer is expected to surpass heart disease to become the leading cause of death in the United States.
Cancer Immunotherapy is the only approach that has ever demonstrated an ability to generate durable remissions even in advanced tumors, but there are significant financial and organizational barriers to success. The pharmaceutical industry’s R&D pipeline remains significantly focused on novel chemo and “targeted” agents.
In this scenario, it comes as a relief to patients suffering from Cancer that tech billionaire and facebook co-founder Sean Parker is donating $250 million to six cancer centers nationwide, including Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan Kettering and Stanford.
The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy is an unprecedented collaboration between the country’s leading immunologists and cancer centers — Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Stanford University, UCLA, UCSF, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the University of Pennsylvania — for the
first time unifying the research programs, intellectual property licensing, data collection, and clinical trials across multiple centers under the umbrella of a single non-profit biomedical research organization.The new Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco will fund “high risk best ideas that may not get funded by the government,” says Jeffrey Bluestone, a prominent immunologist and former University of California, San Francisco official who now heads the institute.
The institute hopes to improve upon what it calls slow progress in improving cancer survival rates. In the last 20 years, federal data show the the five-year survival rate for lung cancer is up from just over 13% to about 17%.
Sean Parker says he is putting his money behind cancer immune therapy because it is at a turning point and would benefit from research that is done without regard for the costs. Immunotherapy, which enhances the body’s immune system to kill cancer is the only approach that has ever demonstrated an ability to generate durable remissions even in advanced tumors, but there are significant financial and organizational barriers to success.
Parker’s enormous cash infusion is the largest ever for cancer immunotherapy and one of the largest ever for cancer research and comes three months after President Obama called for a $1 billion federal cancer research program that he dubbed a “moonshot.”
Just as the White House’s moonshot hopes to foster collaboration between typically competing hospitals, Parker’s new institute will coordinate research across the six academic cancer centers and other researchers who may be added after additional money is raised. Each of the cancer centers in the consortium agrees it will send top scientists to join the Parker Institute and relinquish considerable control over their research.
Currently, immune therapy is only approved “as a treatment of last resort,” Parker complains, which he says means it’s only used after patients’ immune systems are destroyed by chemotherapy and radiation
“I want to make it a front-line treatment,” Parker said in an interview. “It would change the whole cost of care downstream. We want to be focused and we want to go fast.” says Parker. “Two words don’t come up often when talking about cancer research are ‘focus and fast.'”
