Sean Parker Invests $250 Million in Cancer Research

Sean Parker, is a well-known name in the tech community. And how could he not be? As the co-founder of Napster and first president of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), there’s a lot to be excited about. However, it’s the tech mogul’s latest investment that should spark interest within the healthcare community, particularly in the area of immunotherapy. On Wednesday, Parker announced that he would be donating a significant $250 million to support immunotherapy research in an effort to accelerate the development of effective cancer treatments. 
The donation, which is touted as the largest single contribution made in the field of immunotherapy research, will create a collaboration among more than 300 researchers from across the United States, forming the new Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Unlike the current system of cancer research, Parker wants the contributing scientists collaborating, with an aim to have the research turned around into actual therapies at an accelerated pace.
In this new endeavor, Parker is looking ways to “remove obstacles related to bureaucracy and personality that will allow scientists to borrow from each other’s labs unencumbered.” According to The Star, the researchers will continue to work from their home institutions, however they will receive additional funding and access to other resources through Parker’s non-profit institute.
“We are at an inflection point in cancer research and now is the time to maximize immunotherapy’s unique potential to transform all cancers into manageable diseases, saving millions of lives,” Parker said in a statement. “We believe that the creation of a new funding and research model can overcome many of the obstacles that currently prevent research breakthroughs.”
As to why the billionaire chose cancer, investors can look to a 2013 speech that Parker gave at the Cancer Research Institute awards gala where he professed that he is “fundamentally interested in the science of immunotherapy.”

Immunotherapies to fight cancer

A relatively new area or research, immunotherapy is an evolving approach to combating cancer, by mobilizing the body’s immune system to fight the mutant cancer cells. The feeling is that immunotherapies hold the are the future of cancer therapies.
“Cancer immunotherapy is such an incredibly complex field, and for every answer, it seems to pose 10 more questions.” said Parker, “I’m an entrepreneur, so I wish some of these questions had been answered yesterday.”
For decades, researchers have been working on immunotherapies, however, it has only been rather recently that the work has been paying off with the approvals of new drugs to treat melanoma and other cancers. Furthermore, as the San Francisco Gate highlights, the discovery of a molecule that plays an important role in how cancers hide from an individual’s immune system, combined with advancements in gene therapies, have played a large role in contributing to the strides made in the immunotherapy field.
The Parker Institute will be based in San Francisco. The research, according to FierceBiotech the focus will be on the emerging immunotherapy field of cancer research which is currently being “by Bristol-Myers Squibb’s (NSYE:BMY) Opdivo and Merck’s (NYSE:MRK) Keytruda, with a new PD-L1 drug from Roche (OTCMKTS:RHHBY) expected to be approved by the FDA later this year. Together, the drugs target certain forms of lung cancer, skin cancer, and bladder cancer.

Right time for cancer investment

US President Obama made it clear in January’s State of the Union address that the fight against cancer is on. The President tasked US Vice President Joe Biden to advise the government’s $1 billion “moonshot” initiative to cure cancer.
That said, Parker’s influx of funding into cancer research comes on the heels of one of the most recent success cases in the field of immunotherapy. As such, Parker’s hope is to make treatments available to more patients.
 
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Securities Disclosure: I, Vivien Diniz, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.