LOS ANGELES — Sean Parker was a pioneer in music sharing when he co-founded Napster and in social media as the early president of Facebook. Now he wants to pioneer in a field that is already jumping with activity: cancer immunotherapy.

Mr. Parker is announcing Wednesday that he is donating $250 million to a new effort that will bring together six leading academic centers to develop ways to unleash patients’ own immune systems to fight cancer.

The Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy will try to spur collaboration among the centers, having them share research materials and discoveries and jointly conduct clinical trials to try to accelerate progress.

“How do we get more therapies to market faster and more cheaply?” Mr. Parker said in an interview, adding that his effort represented a new “blueprint for biomedical research funding.”