The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the philanthropic arm of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan has recently committed $25 million to accelerate the development of treatments for COVID-19.
The organization has partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard to support efforts to identify and assess potentially promising therapies for COVID-19, expedite their development, and scale up their production to benefit millions of patients worldwide.
These leading organizations have together contributed a huge amount of money to the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator which is a global effort to help speed the development of treatments for coronavirus.
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According to a statement released by CZI, the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator brings together resources and expertise to lower the financial and technical risk for academia, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments while ensuring equal access to these therapies once they are developed which includes making them available and affordable in underserved communities.
“We’re excited to partner with the Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard to help the biomedical research community quickly identify, develop, and test treatments for COVID-19,” said CZI.
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“The Therapeutics Accelerator will enable researchers to quickly determine whether or not existing drugs have a potential benefit against COVID-19. We hope these coordinated efforts will help stop the spread of COVID-19 as well as provide shared, reusable strategies to respond to future pandemics,” it added.