Sean Parker Announces $250 Million Grant To Fight Cancer (cnn.com) 29
Robert Mclean, reporting for CNN: Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker announced a $250 million grant on Wednesday to establish the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, which aims to increase collaboration among researchers and accelerate the development of immune therapies. Immunotherapy uses the body's own immune system to help fight cancer, and is considered one of the most promising areas of emerging cancer research. More than 40 laboratories and more than 300 researchers and immunologists will participate in the project, including six top cancer centers: Memorial Sloan Kettering, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, Stanford, UCLA and UCSF. The Institute said that under the program, intellectual property licensing, data collection and clinical trials across multiple centers will be unified for the first time. The administration of all intellectual property will be shared across teams.
Cancer is doomed... (Score:1)
250 million??? Dr Evil is impressed.
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$250 Million is nothing. We've already spent 100 times that amount and have little to show for it.
In the early 1990s i read an article which claimed that cancer research was mostly a scam. Not so much a deliberate scam but people were allegedly being overly conservative and not pursuing every possible avenue, because if you're actually successful then all those billions for research go away. At the time, I dismissed the article as just conspiracy theory crackpottery, (much like the claims of automobile
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I also don't think the medical professionals research
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$250 Million is nothing. We've already spent 100 times that amount and have little to show for it.
Yes, 250 million is a drop in the ocean.
Instead of spending all the money on prolonging life and suffering, how about accepting death and spending money on improving life?
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Part of the problem with cancer research is that we keep finding ways in which cancers we thought were the same are, in fact, different and need to be treated differently (sometimes). Immunotherapy, however, has already had some really big successes. Carl June's group has gotten success rates of 90%+ with some leukemias and lymphomas. The main reason we're seeing more and more people get/die from cancer is that cancer is sort of i
"Bob Dylan doesn't go in the Punk_Rock folder!" (Score:3)
Silicon Valley billionaire [and Napster founder] Sean Parker... establish[ed] the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy,...under the program, intellectual property licensing... will be unified for the first time. The administration of all intellectual property will be shared across teams.
"Napsterman To Copyright Cure For Cancer", huh? If they succeed, karma dictates that pretty soon everyone will hoarding two full lifetimes worth of Parker Institutes cancer cures, even for cancers that they don't have and have no particular need to cure.
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won't work, 'cause cancer's contagious (Score:2)
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please, don't believe anything published in the NYT. Nothing is settled when it comes to cancer except you can get it and in most cases it'll eventually kill you.
Yet Another Foundation? (Score:3)
Why do people always start their own foundation? It's a duplication of effort. You need to hire people to run things, need to do all the legal stuff, etc., etc. Why not take that money and give it to an existing organization? The pride of having YOUR NAME on the effort?
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Two primary reasons:
The second reaso
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any quite sophisticated backup and recovery mechanism that compensates for file system or file corruption.
Known since the days of Tacitus, the law of bureaucracy means that the larger an organization grows, the larger the ratio of administrative positions to workers, because the administrative positions also need administrative support. Small companies will have less overhead than big ones.
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Dude, don't you know that startups and can do anything? If you restate a problem into a startup, you'll have at least a working prototype in a few months.
There's probably some merit to the idea in some ways if you filter out some of the ego and myopia. The older an organization is, the more likely it may be hanging onto old ideas or ways of thinking that can be counter-productive. And the larger an organization is, the more slowly it changes.
Requisite... (Score:2)
South Park reference: "And... it's gone..."
Comment removed (Score:3)
Advertising, not research (Score:1)
The Institute said that under the program, intellectual property licensing, data collection and clinical trials across multiple centers will be unified for the first time.
So what? That does nothing to make it useful, it just makes it less useful cause you'll now have 6 groups competing to learn and gain from the shared research all while hiding the bits of research and data they think they can patent and make profitable.
If you want to actually cure cancer, make ALL THE RESEARCH ENTIRELY OPEN WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED.
THEN come talk to me about actually wanting to cure cancer and do it with collaboration and do it for the good of humanity.
This is just another advertising gimm
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hmmm.. (Score:2)
after decades of research and billions of dollars spend, I don't believe cancer will be cured, not because it is difficult, but because the farmaceutical industry doesn't want to, it's much more profitable to treat the disease than to actually cure it.. At the moment it looks to me that a lot of people seem to get/have cancer, but as I said I don't see a real future in were we will see it actually cured (even though we already do have the knowledge and technology to actually do it)..
Nice, I suppose (Score:2)
Of course, the National Cancer Inst, part of the US's National Institutes of Health, has an *annual* budget just for itself of $4.9 *billion*. And a good bit goes to researchers around the US, such as colleges.
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