Why Collaboration and Innovation Are Key to Improving Medical Research

Sean Parker, an entrepreneur and founder of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, came to the complex world of biotech, life sciences and health care research as an outsider. (Parker co-founded Napster and was the first president of Facebook.) “It seemed like there was tremendous opportunity. The field looked and felt a lot like the early Internet,” he explained at the summit.

“There was a lot of similarity in terms of enthusiasm and excitement and breakthroughs… and yet there were these inherent systemic obstacles that felt like they were slowing down progress,” Parker said. The cost of enrolling a patient in a clinical trial, for instance, can be “extraordinarily high,” and researchers focused on similar treatment goals often work separately from one another — without sharing data.

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