His gift will ease some of the burden scientists face to get research money, according to investigators at the participating institutions.
“I spend upwards of 30 percent of my time raising money to do my work,” said Jedd Wolchok, chief of the melanoma and immunotherapeutics service at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
The funding will also let researchers quickly test new ideas that often languish as the grant process lumbers forward, said Lewis Lanier, chair of the department of microbiology and immunology at UCSF.
“The academic model provides stability but doesn’t provide for opportunistic moves,” he said by telephone.
Billionaires’ Funding
The institute has set three initial goals to tackle: determining why some patients don’t respond to a new immune-based drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors that include Merck & Co.’s Keytruda and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s Opdivo; improving engineered immune cell therapies to make them safer and more effective; and discovering new targets for future treatments, including making cancer vaccines.
New forms of cancer treatment are drawing attention and funding to the field, particularly for therapies that enhance or harness the immune system. Current immunotherapies cure about 20 percent of metastatic melanoma patients, said Lanier, who hopes that the consortium can double that rate in the next five years.
In March, Michael Bloomberg and philanthropist Sidney Kimmel led a $125 million donation to create a new cancer institute at John Hopkins University focused on immunotherapy treatments. Bloomberg is the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News. Vice President Joseph Biden launched the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative in January, and billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong has also brought together his own coalition of drugmakers to tackle cancer.
Parker’s experience as an entrepreneur may help transform the consortium’s findings into biotechnology companies or attract licensing deals with big pharma, said Wolchok, who called the billionaire “enthusiast in chief.”
“There’s an element that’s risky when you’re betting the farm on one idea at one moment in time,” Parker said about his gift. “But that’s the way to achieve extraordinary change.”