Innovations in technology are at the core of Silicon Valley, but this tech billionaire is pushing for the advancement of medical research this time.
"We've all been affected by cancer with someone in our lives," Sean Parker said Wednesday on CNBC's "Closing Bell." "Even though we've made some pretty good progress in treating about half of all cancers ... we haven't been as successful in bringing new therapies to market."
Immunotherapy, a treatment that uses parts of a person's immune system to combat diseases such as cancer, is the outlier to this battle, according Parker, former president of Facebook.
Parker announced a donation of $250 million for the research of immunotherapy for cancer treatments on Wednesday, an endeavor from his organization, The Parker Foundation. According to the American Cancer Society, immunotherapy is a very active area of cancer research.
The new venture, The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy includes more than 300 researchers and 40 laboratories, and is a "grand experiment" that removes data-sharing barriers, Parker told CNBC. "Providing that infrastructure to bring everybody together, this is how we think we are going to move science forward," he said.
Among the scientists are experts from New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering, Stanford Medicine, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, San Francisco, Houston's University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, according to its website.
Parker, who likens life sciences to the way the internet sector in the mid-90s felt to him, said that company controversy in the biotech sector should not impact investor appetite. His comments came as federal regulators may ban Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes from running or owning any lab businesses amid accusations of failing to resolve issues at one of her labs, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Theranos spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan told CNBC she was hopeful that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would not impose sanctions, as the company works on comprehensive corrective measures, including the recent recruitment of an advisory board of scientific and medical experts. "But if they do, we will work with CMS to address all of their concerns," Buchanan confirmed to CNBC.
"The public beating that biotech stocks have taken it's a bigger deterrent," Parker said. "I'm not worried about any individual company tainting this incredibly exciting moment."
—CNBC's Jessica Hartogs and Anita Balakrishnan contributed to this report.