Silicon valley ramps up efforts to tackle virus

The country’s tech giants have joined with the White House in a task force to fight the new coronavirus, as Silicon Valley escalates its efforts to tackle the fast-moving pandemic, according to people familiar with the group. The companies, including Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., on Sunday conducted a nearly hourlong meeting with White House officials, including Michael Kratsios, chief technology officer of the U.S., one of these people said. Sam Altman, who headed up Silicon Valley’s famed Y-Combinator startup accelerator, posted on Twitter and his blog Sunday saying he wants to fund more startups helping to fight the virus because “it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help.” Mr. Altman posted a spreadsheet where others could write in their ideas of startups to fund and quickly had more than three dozen companies listed. But given that that didn’t happen fast enough we need to think about Plan B.” One of the companies Mr. Altman invested in this week is Cambridge, Mass.,-based Helix Nanotechnologies Inc. For the past two years it has been working on a new cancer vaccine, but on Tuesday the team huddled via videoconference and decided to use the technology they are developing to fight the coronavirus.