Zuckerberg and Chan founded Biohub with $600 million

Person: Mark Zuckerberg
Lived: b. 1984
Field: Technology
From: American

The story

By 2016 Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan had set out their philanthropic aims through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which they founded in late 2015. One of its boldest goals was to help science cure, prevent or manage all disease. To pursue it, the couple looked for ways to bring scientists together across institutional boundaries.

In 2016 the initiative gave $600 million to create the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a nonprofit research centre in San Francisco's Mission Bay district, near the University of California, San Francisco. The idea, which had emerged in 2015, was to foster collaboration between scientists at three leading universities, UCSF, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University, by bringing researchers from different institutions into one shared space. The Biohub was led for its first five years by two co-presidents, the scientists Joseph DeRisi and Stephen Quake.

From the start the Biohub supported researchers beyond its own walls. Its first cohort of Biohub Investigators, chosen in 2017, comprised 47 scientists who each received $1 million over five years. A second cohort of 86 researchers followed in 2022, the year a wider Biohub Network was launched to link partner institutions in other regions of the United States.

The Biohub also built openness into its rules. Its investigators and staff scientists are required to post submitted manuscripts and related data on preprint servers such as bioRxiv, so findings are shared quickly. Intellectual property from the work is jointly owned by the Biohub and the discoverer's home institution, and inventors can choose to make discoveries open source with the Biohub's permission. In 2021 Zuckerberg and Chan committed further funding of up to $1 billion, extending support for the Biohub through 2031.

Today Biohub describes its mission as curing or preventing all disease. It builds technology to help scientists everywhere study how cells operate and work together, combining large-scale imaging and data generation with artificial intelligence models that predict how human cells behave. Its research ranges from mapping cells and decoding inflammation to engineering immune cells that could detect early signs of diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's.

The original $600 million gift created a model for research philanthropy: an independent institute that links rival universities, shares data openly and funds bold, long-term science.