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Billionaire announces $250 million in cancer immunotherapy funding

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/04/13/billionaire-announces-250-million-cancer-immunotherapy-funding/82821198/

Billionaire announces $250 million in cancer immunotherapy funding

WASHINGTON — Cancer immunotherapy will get a hefty dose of its own moonshot
Wednesday when a tech billionaire announces he's giving $250 million to six
cancer centers nationwide, including Manhattan's Memorial Sloan Kettering
and Stanford.

Sean Parker, founder of the music file-sharing service Napster and the
founding president of Facebook, 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.

Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Sean Parker, who founded Napster and was the first president of Facebook,
is taking on cancer immunotherapy now. He was photographed at the Four
Seasons in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Immunotherapy, which enhances the body's immune system to kill cancer
cells, is best known these days because former president Jimmy Carter was
on an immune-based drug treatment when he announced in December that there
is no detectable cancer in his body.

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." The estate of the
billionaire shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig donated $540 million to six
cancer centers in 2014 and Nike co-founder Phil Knight pledged $500 million
to cancer researchers at Oregon Health & Science University in 2013.

Last month, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, Jones Apparel
Group founder Sidney Kimmel and other philanthropists announced a $125
million donation for cancer immunotherapy research for the Johns Hopkins
University medical school.

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%.

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
here last month. "It would change the whole cost of care downstream."

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.

Thanks to the funding, Jedd Wolchok, a renowned cancer researcher and
oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, estimates he and his staff
spend about a third of their time working to get grant funding and, "now we
can use our time to directly make progress."

Some try to manage expectations when it comes to cancer immunotherapy,
which led to many sensational reports of what some mistakenly described as
Carter's "cure."

Cleveland oncologist Stan Gerson says immunotherapy can lead to "dramatic
responses in lethal cancers," but he notes that just 30%-40% of patients
benefit, most relapse in one to three years, and little is known about how
and why some patients respond and others don't.

"Is it a replacement for everything else we’re doing?” Gerson says of
immunotherapy. “Right now we can’t say so ... but this is the time to make
investments and pronouncements."

John O’'Boyle for USA TODAY

Dr. Jedd D. Wolchok , Chief, Melanoma and Immunotherapeutics Service at more

Gerson, who is director of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, estimates
that another $10 billion would be needed to get the treatments approved and
to patients.

Parker is contributing a quarter of the total moonshot Obama proposed for
all cancer research and jump-starting the research in the most promising
area right now.

"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.'"


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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