A few years back, Sean Parker was eating at a Thai restaurant when his face swelled, his chest tightened and his throat began to close. He was in the throes of an anaphylactic allergic reaction. "There must have been a nut in one of the dishes," says Parker, 35, who has severe peanut, tree nut and shellfish allergies. He rushed to the emergency room where doctors injected him with epinephrine and steroids to get his immune system to calm down. Says Parker: "The emergency room doctor told me on a scale of one to ten--where one is fine and 10 is dead--you're a 9.5." Scary--but nothing new. "According to my wife, allergies have sent me to the emergency room 14 times since I've known her."
His struggle with allergies has inspired Parker--who founded Napster, Plaxo and later became a billionaire after serving as Facebook's first president--to pledge $24 million to Stanford University School of Medicine to create a new research center. Dubbed the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University, it will focus on studying the body's immune response to allergens at the cellular level and search for a potential cure. Dr. Kari Nadeau, who Parker met through Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, will run the center.
Sean Parker (Ben Baker for Forbes)
Steven Bertoni: Sean, did you create the research center to cure yourself?
Sean Parker: The most important thing is to cure kids. This should be a curable disease but all we've done is put band-aids on it. We've been treating symptoms for 10o years. The scariest thing is for parents. You can't be with your kids 24 hours a day--they'll be in school and at friends' houses. There is a lot of social pressure just to eat things and not ask questions--there is even bullying. It happened to me. Once kids found out I was allergic to peanuts, they'd try to smear peanut butter on me--that could have killed me.
SB: How'd the donation come about?
SP: I take a very venture-like perspective in my philanthropy-- I don't just write a check to go to the cocktail party. You have to back the right people who are pursuing the right set of ideas at the right time. We have the leader in the field--Kari Nadeaau--who has an incredible ability to recruit patients for trials. Stanford is the number one immunology program in the country, so we're working with the best immunology folks and genomics folks. There is a ton of low hanging fruit and great ideas that have never been tried because there haven't been resources to fund them.
SB: What do you hope this center will achieve?
SP: We are setting up the infrastructure for scientific immune monitoring--looking at molecular markers to see how the body reacts to allergens and see why some people are desensitized, and other get allergic reactions. The ultimate goal is to create a therapy that successfully induces tolerance to any allergen in a single treatment. In other words, we're looking for a cure.
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