The techies from Silicon Valley have now entered the fray. A prime example is Sean Parker, of Napster and Facebook fame, who has recruited a distinguished mass of scientists in the field of immunotherapy in the hope that, together, they can move research along faster than by working alone.
According to Mr. Parker, the refreshing difference is that “everyone in our network can play in it. They are able to borrow things from each other’s labs and use discoveries without compromising or encumbering their intellectual properties.”11 So far, his consortium includes the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City, Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the University of California at Los Angeles and at San Francisco. That’s quite an army assembled for this battle, where the foe is far deadlier than those whom Mr. Parker has previously faced, such as the record company executives fighting his revolutionary free music file sharing technology or the other whiz kids who thought they could outrace “the Facebook” in the early years of its development. Perhaps Sean Parker would rather be known as a key player in the battle to cure cancer than as the person who convinced Mark Zuckerberg to drop “the” from Facebook’s name.
A Last Wish
One day, when cancer is conquered and the most stubborn autoimmune diseases get tamed, let’s hope that our ability to provide our patients with the care they deserve is not scuttled by the sound of some fax machine spewing out reams of red tape in the form of paperwork sent on behalf of insurers and pharmacy benefit managers. Sometimes, small details can ruin a victory parade.
Simon M. Helfgott, MD, is associate professor of medicine in the Division of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
References
- Crewdson J. Richard Nixon’s 30-year war—and still counting. Chicago Tribune. 2000 Feb 27.
- National Cancer Institute. Milestone 1971: National Cancer Act of 1971.
- Mukherjee S. (2010) The emperor of all maladies: A biography of cancer. New York: Simon & Schuster.
- Fact sheet: President Obama’s precision medicine initiative. 2015 Jan 30.
- Fact sheet: Investing in the national cancer moonshot. 2016 Feb 1.
- Aggarwal BB, Gupta SC, Kim JH. Historical perspectives on tumor necrosis factor and its superfamily: 25 years later, a golden journey. Blood. 2012 Jan 19;119(3):651–665.
- O’Shea JJ, Gadina M, Kanno Y. Cytokine signaling: Birth of a pathway. J Immunol. 2011 Dec 1;187(11):5475–5478.
- Swetlitz I. ‘I want what Jimmy Carter had’: Patients clamor for the president’s cancer drug. STAT. 2015 Dec 18.
- Chen L, Han X. Anti–PD-1/PD-L1 therapy of human cancer: Past, present, and future. J Clin Invest. 2015 Sep;125(9):3384–3391.
- Kuti Baruch K, Deczkowska A, Rosenzweig N. PD-1 immune checkpoint blockade reduces pathology and improves memory in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. Nat Med. 2016 Feb;22(2):135–137.
- Cha AE. Sean Parker, Silicon Valley’s bad boy genius, wants to kick the *!$% out of cancer. Washington Post. 2016 Apr 15. http://wpo.st/U3eW1.
