One of the original disrupters of the new economy is bringing his approach to medical research. The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, established by Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, is a network of top institutions including Memorial Sloan Kettering, Stanford, the MD Anderson Cancer Center and more. Its goal is to identify and remove obstacles to innovation in traditional research. For example, all of the participating institutes have agreed to accept an approval decision by any of their respective Institutional Review Boards, which “allows us to get major clinical trials off the ground in weeks rather than years,” says Parker, and at lower costs. Perhaps most important, Parker wants to infuse the project with his market sensibility: “We follow the discoveries coming from our researchers and then put our money behind commercializing them,” he says, either by licensing a product or spinning it out into a company. Since its founding in 2016, the institute has brought 11 projects to clinical trials and supported some 2,000 research papers.
A man wearing what looks like a chunky black wristwatch stares at a tiny digital dinosaur leaping over obstacles on a computer screen before him. The man’s hands are motionless, but he’s controlling the dinosaur—with his brain. The device on his wrist is the CTRL-kit, which detects the electrical impulses that travel from the motor neurons down the arm muscles and to the hand almost as soon as a person thinks about a particular movement. “I want machines to do what we want them to do, and I want us to not be enslaved by the machines,” says Thomas Reardon, CEO and co-founder of CTRL-Labs, the device maker. The hunched-over posture and fumbling keystrokes of the smartphone era represent “a step backward for humanity,” says Reardon, a neuroscientist who, in a past life, led the development of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The technology could open up new forms of rehabilitation and access for patients recovering from a stroke or amputation, as well as those with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative conditions, Reardon says.—Corinne Purtill