Chip Wilson, founder, Lululemon who has been battling with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, or FSHD, is funneling US $ 100 million to finding a cure.
Lululemon is a Canadian multinational athletic apparel retailer headquartered in British Columbia and incorporated in Delaware, USA.
Wilson was diagnosed, FSHD a rare muscular disease, in 1987 when he was 32 years-old.
According to FSHD Society, the disease causes the progressive loss of skeletal muscle and affects a little under 900,000 people across the world.
Wilson suffers from an even more uncommon form called FSHD2 that impacts just 5 per cent of those with the disease, Bloomberg noted. He’s one of around 43,000 people impacted by FSHD2 worldwide.
As per media reports, for years after the diagnosis, Wilson maintained a pretty active lifestyle. But he had a ‘wake-up call’ decades later when he was signing a deal with China’s biggest athletic apparel maker Anta Sports Products, to buy a stake in Finnish sports company Amer Sports, and found himself struggling to walk.
By 2022, he had launched a venture philanthropy fund called Solve FSHD, which aims to develop a cure for the disease by 2027. Solve is particularly focused on finding new therapies for FSHD2, and has so far deployed close to US $ 31,000,000 into biotech companies working on various interventions, per its website.
And Wilson seems to believe that ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs can be powerful catalysts for medical innovation because they have the funds to attract talent and take a more results-driven mindset to research than charitable or government organizations.
