Sean Parker has serious allergies. He has been hospitalized many times because he inadvertently ate something to which he is deathly allergic.
But Sean Parker is doing something about allergies. Parker, the co-founder of the online music service Napster and the first president of Facebook, has pledged $24 million toward a campaign to find a cure for allergies.
The money will be used to create the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University in California. The center will study the causes of allergies and try to find new therapies for people with allergies.
"It's not just enough to come up with slightly better incremental improvements on the kind of treatments that are out there," said Parker. "The goal is actually to achieve a cure."
Parker is allergic to shellfish, peanuts, and tree nuts, and also has asthma. He said that he has been hospitalized 14 times for allergic reactions in recent years. He missed most of his senior year in high school because of his allergies, he said. Parker has two small children and, although they show no signs of allergies as yet, fatherhood has made him want to spare his children from any of the problems allergies gave him as he was growing up.
The center will be headed by Kari Nadeau, who is an associate professor of allergies and immunology at Stanford's School of Medicine.
About one in five Americans has allergy of some kind. These range from nuisances like a sniffly nose from a pollen allergy to possibly deadly reactions to foods, bee stings, or other things. That incidence of allergies has increased in recent years but no one knows why. One in 12 children has been diagnosed with a food allergy and this percentage has been doubling every 10 years, according to Nadeau.
