Opinion: Billionaires Step Up to the Plate in Responding to COVID-19

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Some millionaires and billionaires keep their money to themselves, which is fine, of course, because that’s their prerogative. Bill and Melinda Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan are not those kinds of billionaires.

Through their work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the famous couples have pledged billions in research dollars to projects that seek to make the world a healthier, better place. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a broad focus encompassing health, development, opportunity, education and policy, while CZI is a little more singular in its sole mission to “support science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century.”

I must say, I am pleasantly surprised about the amount of kindness and support humankind has been lending each other as we work through this scary pandemic. Large organizations, small businesses and individuals from every walk of life have banded together, and it’s a really wonderful thing to see and experience. Of course, when your last name is Gates and Zuckerberg/Chan, the resources you can lend are more than the average person—and that’s just what they have done.

COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Mastercard and Wellcome committed up to $125 million in seed funding to create the “COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator,” a large-scale initiative to speed the development of and access to therapies for the virus. Recently, CZI committed $25 million to the initiative and the UK government promised £40.

Yesterday, the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator awarded its first batch of grants—$20 million each to the University of Washington, University of Oxford and La Jolla Institute for Immunology to fund clinical trials to identify highly potent immunotherapies.

The University of Washington’s multi-site clinical trial will take place in Western Washington and the New York City area, investigating whether hydroxychloroquine (a well-established drug for malaria) can effectively prevent COVID-19 in people already exposed to the infection. The trial will enroll up to 2,000 asymptomatic men and women who are close contacts of persons with confirmed or pending COVID-19 diagnoses. Sandoz, a Novartis division (see what I mean about companies lending a helping hand?) donated the hydroxychloroquine doses needed to conduct the double-blind study, the results of which will be available in late 2020.

The group at Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit will lead a placebo-controlled prophylaxis study of chloroquine (a well-established drug for rheumatological conditions) and hydroxychloroquine in preventing COVID-19 in at-risk health care workers, frontline staff and other high-risk groups. At least 40,000 persons across Asia and Europe will participate in the year-long project, with initial results available by the end of this year.

The $2 million to La Jolla Institute for Immunology will help establish the Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium, known as CoVIC. The effort will bring together scientists from around the world and enable them to share and evaluate candidate antibodies side by side in a blinded, multidisciplinary analysis to identify ideal therapeutic combinations.

Additionally, a consortium of life sciences companies pledged to collaborate with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to accelerate treatments, vaccines and diagnostics. Fifteen companies, identified below, agreed to share their proprietary libraries of molecular compounds that already have some degree of safety and activity data to quickly screen them for potential use against COVID-19. Successful hits would move rapidly into in vivo trials in as little as two months. These companies include: Bayer, BD, bioMérieux, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eisai, Eli Lilly, Gilead, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck KGaA, Novartis, Pfizer and Sanofi.

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

When CZI introduced Cori Bargmann as president of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2016, one of her first orders of business was announcing the “Biohub.” The $600 million Biohub serves as a collaboration point and is designed to create synergy among Stanford University, the University of California San Francisco and the University of California Berkeley. Earlier this month, supported by an executive order from California’s governor, the Biohub used their capabilities to increase the volume of local clinical testing for COVID-19 to at least 1,000 tests per day—with the first batch going to the sickest patients. Now, the Biohub is actively working toward increasing capacity to further assist health departments and local testing.

As part of a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy project, CZI engineers collaborated with partners in academia, medicine and technology to aggregate and launch a machine-readable dataset on coronavirus research. The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) will allow scientists to more quickly find information about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and the coronavirus group, as well as discover and share new insights. The open dataset contains more than 29,000 coronavirus-related scientific articles.

Lastly, understanding how essential research data is right now, CZI launched an open-source public version of IDseq for scientists to study the genomic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The philanthropic initiative also uploaded the sequence to GISAID and Nextstrain, both open-source data repositories, to ensure all scientists had access.

So yes, things feel bleak right now. I know some of you researchers are not able to get into your labs, especially if you’re in academia. If you’re in or close to New York City like me, there’s no doubt you are missing the laboratory and the research and innovation you help create. And I’m sorry for that. But, know there are researchers, scientists, mega-organizations, small businesses, moms, dads and grandmas down the road that are committed to working through this pandemic together. If there’s a bright side, that’s it.

Stay safe.

Photo credit: Harvard University