The U.S. government spends $5 billion every year on cancer research; charities and private firms add billions more. Yet the return on this investment—in terms of lives saved, suffering reduced—has long been disappointing: Cancer death rates are drifting downward in the past 20 years, but not as quickly as we’d hoped. Even as the science makes incremental progress, it feels as though we’re going in a circle.
That’s a “hackable problem,” says Silicon Valley pooh-bah Sean Parker, who last week announced his founding of a $250 million institute for research into cancer immunotherapy, an old idea that’s come around again in recent years. “As somebody who has spent his life as an entrepreneur trying to pursue kind of rapid, disruptive changes,” Parker said, “I’m impatient.”
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