Napster founder funding CRISPR trial

Sean Parker, Facebook's first president and co-founder of Napster, is funding of the first test of CRISPR gene-editing technology in humans. The trial will involve the modification of immune system T cells to fight three types of cancer: melanoma, sarcoma and myeloma. Patients' T cells will be removed and then reinfused a month later after alterations to their DNA causing them to seek out and destroy tumours. Parker says he regards T cells as being a bit like "little computers" that can be reprogrammed. There are complex safety issues surrounding the project, including whether the gene-editing alterations will be accurate enough, and there is no guarantee the project will progress.

Now we can report that Parker, a 36-year-old whose net worth is estimated at $2.4 billion, is financing the study.

Parker, best known for his role as Facebook’s first president and as co-creator of the pirate music site Napster, splashed into cancer research in April, saying he’d give $250 million in funding to six centers, including one at the University of Pennsylvania, in what he called a “Manhattan project for curing cancer with the immune system.”

Penn confirmed Parker’s charitable foundation would be funding the trial, which will use gene-editing to modify immune system T cells to attack three types of cancer: myeloma, melanoma, and sarcoma.

Sean Parker

Parker’s backing highlights how wealthy Internet entrepreneurs think they can speed up cancer research. Parker, a one-time hacker whose resume includes a run-in with the FBI, has said he thinks of T cells as being “like little computers” that can be reprogrammed (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2016: Immune Engineering").

There’s no shortage of funding for immune therapy. New drugs are able to cure some cases of advanced melanoma; T cell treatments, including some pioneered at Penn, have seen dramatic success against leukemia.

But Parker’s foundation is unusual because it says it will control patents on research it funds and even bring treatments to market. Parker compared the tactic to convincing record labels to license their music to Spotify, the popular legal music-sharing service he also is an investor in.

“What if we had a system where all the [intellectual property] could be shared among the scientists?” he told Dateline NBC in a program that aired in May.

The new cancer treatment developed at Penn uses gene-editing to modify T cells so they more effectively target certain cancers other than leukemia. Penn appears to have filed a patent on the idea last October, according to European patent records.