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Sean Parker was a pioneer in music sharing when he co-founded Napster and in social media as the early president of Facebook. Now he wants to pioneer in a field that is already jumping with activity: cancer immunotherapy. Mr. Parker is announcing Wednesday that he is donating $250 million to a new effort that will bring together six leading academic centers to develop ways to unleash patients’ own immune systems to fight cancer. (Pollack, 4/13)

"Any breakthrough made at one center is immediately available to another center without any kind of IP (intellectual property) entanglements or bureaucracy," Parker, the co-founder of music-sharing website Napster and the first president of Facebook, told Reuters in an interview. The institute will focus on the emerging field of cancer immunotherapy, which harnesses the body's immune system to fight cancer cells. (Beasley, 4/13)

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. (O'Donnell, 4/13)

“Everybody knows that we need to move forward and change the model” for cancer research, Jeffrey Bluestone, an immunology researcher and the institute’s CEO, told The Associated Press Tuesday. “The goal here is to rapidly move our discoveries to patients.” For decades, fiercely competitive and secretive drugmakers protected their money-making discoveries with patents and lawsuits. Academic researchers likewise often guarded their work closely until it was published because their promotions, awards and sometimes revenue from licensing patents depended on individual achievement. That often slowed progress. (Johnson, 4/13)

“Cancer immunotherapy is such an incredibly complex field, and for every answer it seems to pose 10 more questions. I’m an entrepreneur so I wish some of these questions had been answered yesterday,” Parker said. He describes the effort as a way to remove obstacles related to bureaucracy and personality that will allow scientists to borrow from each other’s labs unencumbered. The researchers will continue to be based at their home institutions but will receive additional funding and access to other resources, including specialized data scientists and genetic engineering equipment set to become part of the nonprofit Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco. (Cha, 4/13)

Specifically, Parker said his institute will place its initial bets on three broad areas of research: developing a new generation of T-cell therapies; investigating new uses for, and effective new combinations of, the kinds of "checkpoint inhibitor" drugs that have already proved effective for skin, lung and kidney cancers; and improving the effectiveness and potential uses for vaccines and cellular therapies in fighting a wider array of cancers. (Healy, 4/12)

Bold cancer campaigns have proved disappointing in the past, and big advances aren’t likely overnight. Researchers are learning that tumor cells and immune-system cells are enormously complex, complicating efforts to understand how their interactions promote or inhibit disease. In addition, the high costs of immunotherapy drugs that reach the market are prompting concerns about the affordability of potentially life-saving treatments. The new efforts are fueled in part by the initial success of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Merck & Co. as well as still-experimental ways to engineer immune-system cells to attack tumors. Many patients with advanced melanoma, lung cancer and leukemia have survived for years after being given only weeks or months to live. (Winslow, 4/13)

Billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker has donated $250 million to launch an effort, based in San Francisco, that combines the forces of six top cancer research centers nationwide to develop treatments in the growing field of cancer immunotherapy, which uses the power of the body’s immune system to fight disease. (Colliver, 4/13)