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California billionaire Sean Parker donates $250 million to launch cancer immunotherapy research effort
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A California billionaire pledged $250 million to create a new venture designed to accelerate advances in cancer treatment.
The grant from the Parker Foundation — founded by Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook and co-founder of the music-sharing website Napster — will establish the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
The effort is designed to foster collaboration between immunotherapy researchers across the country.
Six of the country’s top cancer centers have agreed to participate: The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; Stanford Medicine; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, San Francisco; and University of Pennsylvania.
“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. Working closely with our scientists and more than 30 industry partners, the Parker Institute is positioned to broadly disseminate discoveries and, most importantly, more rapidly deliver treatments to patients.”
Jeffrey Bluestone, PhD — distinguished professor of metabolism and endocrinology at UCSF and founder of the Immune Tolerance Network, a multicenter clinical immunology research program — will serve as president and CEO of the Parker Institute.
“Immunotherapy represents a fundamentally new, breakthrough treatment paradigm in the fight against cancer,” Bluestone said in a UCSF news release. “It harnesses the body’s own powerful immune system to mobilize its highly refined disease-fighting arsenal to engage and eliminate the cancer cells.”
Other members of the institute’s leadership team are Jim Allison, PhD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; Carl June, MD, of University of Pennsylvania; Lewis Lanier, PhD, of UCSF; Crystal Mackall, MD, of Stanford; Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, of UCLA; and Jedd Wolchok, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a HemOnc Today Editorial Board member.
June, professor of immunotherapy in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and director of translational research at Abramson Cancer Center, said his institution is “tremendously excited” to join the effort.
“[This collaboration] will allow us to investigate promising new immunotherapy avenues for the treatment of cancer outside of our institutional silos in very unique ways,” June said in a Penn-issued press release. “Working together will enable us to make quicker progress as we work to translate our laboratory findings into clinical trials.”
Perspective
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Dale Shepard, MD, PhD
The real benefit of this initiative for patients with cancer is that it provides a different way to support basic research and get people working together in a more collaborative way. There is a significant need to break away from the traditional NIH, big pharma or startup company funding. Particularly on the basic science side, everyone gets extremely focused on what they are doing. This often is by necessity, as they have to focus on a very narrow question to maintain funding. However, the research of a person working in one particular area has tremendous implications for people working in other areas. Even if you have an idea that might build upon an aspect of someone else’s work and you look for traditional funding, there is a very low chance you will get that funding. This effort allows for the cross-fertilization of ideas. The ability to get everyone together — and having the money to actually act on these ideas — is tremendously important.
We have the cancer moonshot initiative on the federal level. This is more of a grassroots way to do the same thing, but it incorporates some really key players. If we can get the best people thinking about immunotherapy, working together and sharing ideas, patients are bound to benefit.
I have been cautiously optimistic about the potential of immunotherapy. Checkpoint inhibitors have been approved in melanoma, lung cancer and kidney cancer, and they have dramatically changed how we treat patients. There are very promising data in liver and bladder cancers. Yet, there are a lot of tumors for which we still don’t know what the responses are.
One of the keynote presentations at last year’s ASCO Annual Meeting looked at the combination of nivolumab (Opdivo, Bristol-Myers Squibb) and ipilimumab (Yervoy, Bristol-Myers Squibb) in treatment-naive patients with advanced melanoma (Wolchok J, et al. Abstract LBA1. Presented at: ASCO Annual Meeting; May 29-June 2, 2015; Chicago). Although this was heralded as a great success, the complete response rate was still pretty low. This is a dramatic improvement over what we have available, but it is by no means an overwhelming success. We still have a lot of patients who do not respond to these therapies. Unraveling why these therapies work in some patients and don’t work in others is extremely important. This collaborative effort and the availability of funds to be able to answer those questions in a more unrestrictive way could be huge.
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