Chip Wilson, Lululemon founder, is funneling $100 million into his newest venture: solving a rare muscular disease called FSHD.
Reuters
Lululemon founder Chip Wilson is battling FSHD, a rare form of muscular dystrophy.He’s investing $100 million into finding a cure through his venture philanthropy fund, Solve FSHD.He’s also been testing a host of longevity treatments ranging from acupuncture to IV drips.
Lululemon founder Chip Wilson has been battling a rare muscular disease for the past several decades, and he’s funneling $100 million of his multibillion net worth into finding a cure.
Wilson was diagnosed with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, or FSHD, in 1987 when he was 32 years-old, Bloomberg reported. The disease causes the progressive loss of skeletal muscle and affects a little under 900,000 people across the world, according to FSHD Society. Wilson suffers from an even more uncommon form called FSHD2 that impacts just 5% of those with the disease, Bloomberg noted. In other words, he’s one of around 43,000 people impacted by FSHD2 worldwide.
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, according to Bloomberg.
By 2022, he had launched a venture philanthropy fund called Solve FSHD, which aims to develop a cure for the disease by 2027, according to its website. Solve is particularly focused on finding new therapies for FSHD2, and has so far deployed close to $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. Capitalism has “created everything good in the world,” he told Bloomberg.
In the meantime, Wilson is also resorting to experimental procedures, and testing several longevity and wellness treatments to combat the disease. He’s undergoing electroacupuncture, IV drips of NAD which is an enzyme that plays a critical role in healthy cell function, taking weekly doses of immunosuppressive drug, rapamycin, and daily doses of testosterone, Bloomberg reported.
Solve FSHD did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for a comment.