Last week, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which will invest $3 billion into basic research with the goal of eliminating and curing diseases by the end of the century. The Initiative intends to bring together teams of scientists and researchers from various fields to collaborate on the development of new technologies for disease prevention and treatment. Neurobiologist Cornelia Bargmann will serve as president of the Initiative, while Shirley Tilghman, president emeritus of Princeton University, and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus will be on the scientific advisory board. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, and Arthur Levinson, chief executive of Google’s anti-aging research company Calico, will also join the Initiative. As part of the Initiative, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub was also established. Based in San Francisco, California, the $600 million Biohub is a decade long partnership with Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and the University of California, Berkeley. The Biohub is fronted by Joseph DeRisi, a biochemist at UCSF, and Stephen Quake, a bioengineer at Stanford. Research at the Biohub will concentrate on using single-cell sequencing and genetic editing for the creation of a “human-cell atlas” that will enable researchers to develop methods to prevent and treat diseases. The Biohub intends to release updated data on a regular basis and reduce administrative issues that can impede productivity for scientists and researchers.
Source: Nature