The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, a research network established by tech entrepreneur Sean Parker, announced a new $125 million investment.
The latest investment comes from Parker and his wife, Alexandra, and other unnamed donors. It will be distributed as grants to research institutions over the next five years, though it won’t be used for salaries, IP or clinical trials, for which the institute provides separate funding. The $125 million represents the most new research funding since the institute was founded in 2016 with Parker’s $250 million donation.
The Parker Institute, known as PICI for short, has seven research centers located across the US including Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, and it funds research at a handful of other prestigious cancer centers as well.
The nonprofit has also invested in 17 cancer immunotherapy startups since its inception.
The latest research center was established at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York late last year and is headed by immunotherapy expert Jedd Wolchok, who has been working with PICI since its early days and was one of the founding directors from his time at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
“The initial enthusiasm that I had for PICI really has borne out,” Wolchok told Endpoints News. “What this generous amount of funding allows us to do is to immediately act on high-risk, high-reward ideas, to be creative, to not wait for some of the more classical grant application processes to go through their timescale.”
Wolchok pointed to one area of high-risk, high-reward science that he and others have been working to crack — solid tumor cell therapies. In his own lab, that includes developing a locally delivered bladder cancer CAR-T cell therapy.
The funding will be used for projects from existing PICI researchers as well as a pilot grant program to attract new investigators. “In my prior experience as center director across the street, we were able to really open the tent, if you will, of immunotherapy, and attract world-class scientists who wouldn’t otherwise identify themselves as being immunotherapy-minded to the field because of this,” Wolchok said.
Another tenet that he highlighted was programs to engage young people in cancer research. “This really needs to be expanded across the spectrum to build a pipeline of diverse young people who are interested in immuno-oncology as a career,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to note that PICI provides separate funding for salaries, IP and clinical trials.