CZI Announces the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub

Today we announced a $600 million commitment to create the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a new research hub to bring scientists and engineers together from Stanford, UCSF, Berkeley, along with the world-class engineering team at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to collaborate, make breakthroughs in medicine and develop new technologies.

Leading the Biohub are Stanford’s Stephen Quake and UCSF’s Joe DeRisi, who are part of a new generation of medical researchers seamlessly mixing biology with areas like engineering and computer science.

The Biohub’s first major research projects — the Human Cell Atlas and the Infectious Disease Initiative — will be conducted over the next five years. The Human Cell Atlas is an international effort to map and characterize all cells in the healthy human body. Once complete, it will be an invaluable resource to help scientists better understand how healthy cells work, and what goes wrong when disease strikes. The Infectious Disease Initiative will explore new approaches and tools for creating drugs, diagnostic tests and vaccines that could aid the fight against diseases like HIV, Ebola and newly emerging threats like Zika, greatly accelerating humanity’s ability to respond to outbreaks.

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub will focus on bringing scientists and engineers together to build the modern tools and technologies required to accelerate breakthroughs in today’s four major disease areas: heart disease, cancer, infectious disease, and neurological disease like stroke. These discoveries and new tools will be critical to making progress toward our goal to prevent, manage or cure all diseases by the end of this century. Learn more at www.czbiohub.org.

By Priscilla Chan