Tech entrepreneur Sean Parker is just the latest big name to put up big money to fight cancer.

Parker, who helped found Facebook and Napster, plans to spend $250 million to build teams of researchers who aim to harness the immune system to attack cancer.

That’s on top of the $100 million for cancer immunotherapy research put up by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and clothing magnate Sidney Kimmel. Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong has also assembled a coalition of rival drug companies to focus on immunotherapy. And the White House is proposing spending $755 million on a cancer “moonshot’’ led by Vice President Joe Biden.

So, will all that effort amount to anything? Here are some questions to keep in mind:

Will the money make much difference?

If money could cure cancer, we’d be home free.

Still, extra funding is always welcome. Even eminent cancer researchers spend large fractions of their time applying for grants: Dr. Jedd Wolchok of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, one of six centers that will receive support from Parker, told Reuters it takes 30 percent of his time. If he could spend more hours thinking about curing cancer and less looking for money, presumably he’d make faster progress.

On the other hand, the National Cancer Institute will spend $5.2 billion on research this year, so even when you add all the private funding together, it still represents a bump of less than 10 percent. Each of the six research centers participating in the Parker initiative will get an initial infusion of $10 million to $15 million — not peanuts, but not necessarily a game changer, either.

Are these new initiatives trying a new approach?

Maybe.

They say they’re supporting a new model of cancer research, and they use a lot of MBA buzzwords to make that point. They talk about smashing silos, crunching data, and emphasizing translational research that moves discoveries from the lab bench to patients, not just curing a bunch of lab mice. Above all, they emphasize the power of collaboration.

Some battle-scarred veterans of the country’s previous wars on cancer are holding their applause.

“It is hardly obvious that infusing money into these labs in order to speed up their level of interaction and collaboration will markedly accelerate the pace of discovery, innovation, and the development of new forms of cancer immunotherapy,’’ said cancer biologist Robert Weinberg of the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been in the research trenches for some 40 years.

Is too much money chasing too few ideas?

This has happened before, such as when the federal government decided to make a big push for solar energy.

Immunotherapy, cancer biology’s flavor of the month, is a legitimately promising approach, having spawned drugs that are already in use, as well as many medications and therapeutic vaccines moving through the R&D pipeline.

And there are clear, specific questions to answer, such as why only a small fraction of cancer patients respond to existing immunotherapy drugs.

That will be one focus of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy: Researchers will compare responders and nonresponders to see if they can improve the rates of lasting responses and extend the use of these immunotherapies to more types of cancer.

But there are legitimate questions about whether there’s too much focus on immunotherapy to the exclusion of other good ideas that might be bubbling up, and whether the same researchers keep getting funding at the expense of young innovators who might have entirely different ideas.

After all, virtually every game-changing cancer therapy has come from an iconoclast.

Sharon Begley can be reached at sharon.begley@statnews.com. Follow her on Twitter @sxbegle.