The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced that the foundation will donate $3 billion to fund a plan to help cure, prevent, or manage all diseases.
Speaking at an event at the University of California, San Francisco, Mission Bay Campus, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg talked about their philanthropic venture for the first time and stated that the investment would be made over the next decade as part of their goal to give away 99 percent of their wealth. The fund comes from the $45 billion organization that Zuckerberg and his wife Chan started in 2015 to advance human potential and equality.
The CZI has three goals. One is to bring together scientists and engineers and build new tools and technology that can help advance their goal, the Business Insider reported. The initiative also aims to improve and expand the movement to fund science. Chan said that through the initiative, she hopes to spare parents the pain she has seen while delivering difficult news as a pediatrician.
“In those moments and in many others we're at the limit of what we understand about the human body and disease, the science behind medicine, the limit of our ability to alleviate suffering. We want to push back that boundary,” Chan said.
As part of their investment, the CZI will finance a research center in San Francisco called the Biohub with a $600 million fund, according to Reuters. Biohub will work with UC San Francisco, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley. The Biohub will be led by the University of California, San Francisco Professor Joseph DeRisi and Stanford University Professor Stephen Quake, who worked on small molecule screening and biological measurements.
The two preliminary Biohub project is composed of Cell Atlas, a map of cells controlling the body's major organs, and the Infectious Disease Initiative to develop new tools, tests, vaccines, and strategies for fighting diseases like HIV, Ebola, and Zika.
Neurobiologist Cori Bargmann from Rockefeller University will be the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's president of science. All the research material and output from the organization will be open to doctors and researchers around the globe.