REDWOOD CITY, Calif. Over the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused some of their philanthropy on the lofty goal of “cure, prevent, or control all diseases”—if not in their lifetimes, then in the lifetimes of their children. But during that time, they also funded low-income schools, immigration reform and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Now the billionaire couple is shifting most of their philanthropic resources to Biohub, the couple's scientific organization, and focusing on using artificial intelligence to speed up scientific discoveries. The idea is to develop artificial intelligence-based virtual cell models to understand how they work in the human body, study inflammation, and use artificial intelligence to “harness the immune system” to detect, prevent and treat disease.
“I feel like the scientific work we've done, particularly the Biohub model, has been the most influential thing we've done. So we want to really double down. The Biohub will be a major focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday night at an event at the Biohub Imaging Institute in Redwood City, California. Three other Biohub institutes—in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago—are tackling different scientific challenges.
Chan and Zuckerberg donated 99% of their lifetime wealth—from shares of Meta Platforms, of which Zuckerberg is CEO—to the effort. Since 2016, when Biohub launchedThey donated $4 billion to basic science research, a figure that does not include the operating costs of running a large-scale computer cluster for life sciences research. The organization says it now plans to double that amount over the next decade, with an operating budget of about $1 billion a year.
Last week the singer Billie Eilish told the audience including Chan and Zuckerberg, that rich people should do more to solve the world's problems.
“Love you all, but there are several people here who have a lot more money than I do,” she said to applause. “And if you are a billionaire, then why are you a billionaire? And no hatred, but give away your money, shorties.”
The couple's charity, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, has recently come under fire for cutting back on other charitable activities. Earlier this year, it stopped funding grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion, immigration advocacy and other issues currently in the Trump administration's crosshairs — although for years the focus had shifted toward science rather than social issues, the couple says, long before the 2024 election.
“So we essentially looked at the science funding ecosystem and decided that the biggest impact we could have was in the development of tools,” Zuckerberg said. “And in particular, working on long-term projects, lasting 10 to 15 years, that would solve a biological problem that would create a tool that scientists around the world could use to accelerate the pace of science.”
Earlier this year, the organization removed references to DEI on its website, including a statement that said, “People of color and marginalized communities have endured a long history of exploitation in the name of scientific research, and indeed, science itself has been used as a tool of oppression.”
“Going forward, Biohub will be our primary philanthropic endeavor, to which we will dedicate the majority of our resources,” Zuckerberg and Chen said in a blog post on Thursday. “We will continue our other philanthropic efforts, but the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will provide the infrastructure and support for our initiatives.”
Zuckerberg and Chan's growing commitment to scientific research comes at the same time as the Trump administration. cut billions for scientific research and public health financing.
Chan, who worked as a pediatrician treating children with rare diseases, says that “more than anything, she wanted to see what was going on inside their cells—how genetic mutations were expressed in different types of cells and what was being destroyed.”
“Until now, such understanding was out of reach. AI is changing that. For the first time, we have the potential to model and predict the biology of disease in a way that reveals what has gone wrong and how we can develop new treatments to address it,” she said.
On Thursday, Chan and Zuckerberg also announced that Biohub had hired a team at EvolutionaryScale, an artificial intelligence research lab that has built large-scale artificial intelligence systems for the life sciences. Alex Rives, co-founder of EvolutionaryScale, will lead Biohub's science department, leading research in experimental biology, data science and artificial intelligence. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Biohub's goal over the coming years and decades is to create virtual cellular systems that would not be possible without recent advances in artificial intelligence. Just as large language models are trained on huge databases of digital books, online writings and other media, researchers and scientists are working to create virtual systems that serve as digital representations of human physiology at all levels, such as molecular, cellular or genomic. Because it is open source, free and publicly available, scientists can conduct virtual experiments on a scale not possible in physical laboratories.
Noting that Biohub launched when the couple had their first child, Chan listed some of the organization's accomplishments, ranging from creating the largest single-cell data set, participating in one of the largest maps of human cells, creating sensors to measure inflammation in living cells in real time, and researching rare diseases.
This work continues, with a focus on using AI to advance biomedical research.
“And if you tie it to the impact on patients, you know, why do it?” – said Chan. “Why is the virtual cell so important? We've cured diseases in mice, flies and zebrafish many, many times. And that's great. But we want to make sure that we're actually using biology to advance medicine for humans – and that's so promising.”
