Napster co-Founder Sean Parker is donating $250 million dollars to create the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, a collaboration of six leading academic centers ,including MSK, to pave the way to develop new therapies to use patient’s own immune systems to fight cancer. The Institute will  share research materials and discoveries and jointly conduct clinical trials to try to accelerate progress. “How do we get more therapies to market faster and more cheaply?” Mr. Parker said in an interview, adding that his effort represented a new “blueprint for biomedical research funding.”

MSK will be hosting a new phase 2 clinical trial study for ovarian cancer starting this summer with TapImmune and AstraZeneca/MedImmune. The trial will be of TapImmune’s cancer vaccine TPIV 200, a multi-epitope anti-folate receptor vaccine (FRα), in combination with AstraZeneca’s durvalumab , an anti-PD-L1 antibody, in patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. Continue reading →