Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, just announced that they will spend $3 billion over the next decade in an effort to cure and manage all human diseases.
The news was announced over Facebook Live on September 21. The $3 billion project will be led by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Part of the initiative involves investing $600 million in a project called Biohub, which is an independent research center located at the University of California at San Francisco. That center will use the investment to work on developing new tools to measure and treat diseases.
In a statement at UCSF, Chain explained their motivation behind the project:
“Mark and I spent the past two years talking to scientists ranging from Nobel Prize laureates to graduate students.
We believe that the future we all want for our children is possible. We set a goal: can we cure all diseases in our children's lifetime?
That doesn’t mean that no one will ever get sick. But it does mean that our children and their children should get sick a lot less. And that we should be able to detect and treat or at least manage it as an ongoing condition. Mark and I believe this is possible within our children's lifetime.”
After Chan left the stage, Zuckerberg stepped on stage to reveal a plan for eliminating disease over the upcoming century. He specifically explained that heart disease, infectious disease, cancer, and neurological diseases are the leading causes of modern death.
No single breakthrough is going to eliminate any of these diseases, but an investment in building new tools will help advance progress in fighting diseases more quickly.
“We have to be patient”, Zuckerberg explained.
What Kinds of Tools Will Be Developed Through This Initiative?
It’s easy to say that we need “tools” to help diagnose, measure, and track various diseases. It’s harder to actually describe those tools.
However, Zuckerberg got specific when asked about some of the initiatives, tools, and projects in which they’re investing, including all of the following:
-Artificial intelligence to better understand the brain
-Machine learning to analyze cancer genomes
-Chip that could diagnose any infectious diseases
-Bloodstream monitors that could catch diseases at an earlier stage
Biohub is a Joint Initiative Between Three Schools
One of the unique things about Biohub is that it’s the start of a unique collaboration between three schools, including UCSF, Stanford, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Biohub has already announced its first project, which will be an attempt to develop a cell atlas. That would be a comprehensive account of every location and molecular property of all cells in the human body.
If this cell atlas is successful, then Biohub would provide it to the entire scientific community free of charge.
The Three Mains Goals In The Initiative
1) Bring Scientists and Engineers Together
2) Build Tools and Technologies
3) Grow the Movement to Fund Science
That last goal is important: Mark hopes that the $3 billion investment will inspire other organizations to step forward and fund their own benevolent research towards curing disease.
To learn more about the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and their other research efforts, you can visit the organization’s official website here: https://chanzuckerberg.com/
