One of Silicon Valley’s highest profile stars is turning his attention to the fight against cancer with a $250 million donation to support immunotherapy research. Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook, announced the grant Wednesday, April 13.

The establishment of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy will include more than 40 laboratories and 300 researchers from six cancer centers, including New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering and Stanford Medicine in California. The goal is to encourage collaboration with researchers sharing discoveries, exchanging data and conducting joint clinical trials.

"Any breakthrough made at one center is immediately available to another center without any kind of [intellectual property] entanglements or bureaucracy," Parker told Reuters in an interview.

The institute, which will be based in San Francisco, will emphasize research in three main areas: modifying a patient's own immune system to target a tumor, studying ways to boost patient response to current immunotherapy drugs, and research to identify other novel methods of attacking tumors.

"There have been other cancer therapies that attracted significant funding, particularly from pharmaceutical companies, but I've never seen anything this big," said Otis Brawley, MD, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, which is not associated with the new endeavor. "Given the number of good ideas that don't get funded, $250 million is huge."