Immunotherapy is one of the hottest topics in biotech right now – even the White House wants in with Obama’s $1 billion cancer moonshot initiative. More versions are in the pipeline.
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Dr. Jedd Wolchok, chief of the melanoma and immunotherapeutics unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center – one of the centers involved in the Parker Institute – said that he spends about a third of his time securing funding, which the Institute would eliminate the need for. The Parker center will help with the research and development of immunotherapy treatments.
Immunotherapy-related research will receive less than 4% of the National Cancer Institute’s $4.9 billion cancer research budget in 2015, and the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D pipeline remains significantly focused on novel chemo and “targeted” agents. “What I personally hope is that with PICI we can mobilize the various efforts that have been going on at a smaller scale at MSK”, he said.
The other centers in the partnership are Stanford, UCLA, UC San Francisco, the University of Pennsylvania and Memorial Sloan Kettering in NY.
Parker believes initial treatments of immunotherapy will prove most effective; a method typically reserved until chemotherapy failure or other standard treatments wear off.
What does this mean practically? He explained that some patients who received cancer immune therapy had dramatic responses but pointed out that only about 30 percent to 40 percent patients really benefitted.
The donation, announced Wednesday and considered the largest single contribution made to immunotherapy research, creates a collaboration among more than 300 researchers from UCSF, Stanford University, UCLA, Memorial Sloan Kettering in NY, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to form the new Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
The Parker Institute will also get the six organizations to work together on clinical trials. Since then, he’s tested the method in other blood cancers as well. Though the research will be conducted by researchers in their home institutions, they will get additional funding and access to other resources, including specialized data scientists and genetic engineering equipment. “It saves them months of bickering back and forth”. 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.
“We believe that the creation of a new funding and research model can overcome numerous obstacles that now prevent research breakthroughs”, Parker said in a statement. If the Parker Institute has the patents to all the relevant immunotherapies and crafts the license agreement with pharma companies, that’s no longer a problem.
Parker, 36, the former Facebook president who also helped launch Napster, past year established the Parker Foundation, a private philanthropy that funds life sciences, global health and civic engagement, with a $600 million gift.
The new project will have 300 scientists from leading institutions, such as Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Stanford Medicine, share their findings.
This time around, though, Parker’s putting $250m of his own money into an extensive project that brings rival hospitals together, into one foundation, to develop ways to bring immunotherapy front and centre in the fight to cure cancer.
A million dollars isn’t cool.
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Brawley remembers when immunotherapy was in its infancy in the ’90s, when it was ignored for the hot topic of the day: cancer growth inhibitors. Gerson says of immunotherapy. “I’m hopeful that this becomes a blueprint for other philanthropists”. Several have publicly expressed their disdain for the system that now supports scientific discovery and have established parallel research tracks in some areas more in line with their ideas about innovation. Billionaires out there, here’s your chance.
