Zuckerberg, Chan shift bulk of philanthropy to science, focusing on AI and biology to curb disease

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Over the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused some of their philanthropy on a noble goal — “to cure, prevent, or manage all disease” — if not in their lifetimes, then at least in their children’s lifetimes. But during that time, they also funded underprivileged schools, immigration reform, and efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Now, the billionaire couple is shifting the bulk of their philanthropic resources to Biohub, the couple’s science organization, and focusing on using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. The idea is to develop AI-based virtual cell models to understand how they work in the human body, study inflammation, and use AI to “harness the immune system” for disease detection, prevention, and treatment.

“I feel like the scientific work that we’ve done, the Biohub model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we’ve done. So we really want to double down. Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday evening at an event at the Biohub Imaging Institute in Redwood City, California. Three other Biohub institutes – in New York, San Francisco and Chicago – focus on different scientific challenges.

Chan and Zuckerberg have devoted 99% of their lifetime wealth – from shares of Meta Platforms, of which Zuckerberg is CEO – to these efforts. Since 2016, when Biohub launched, they have donated $4 billion to basic science research, a figure that does not include the operating expenses of running a large-scale computing cluster for life sciences research. The organization says it is now on track to double that amount over the next decade, with an operating budget of around $1 billion a year.

Last week, singer Billie Eilish told an audience that included Chan and Zuckerberg that the rich should do more to solve the world’s problems.

“I love you all, but there are a few people here who have a lot more money than me,” she said to some applause. “And if you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? And no hate, but give your money, shorties.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s charity, has recently come under fire for scaling back its other philanthropic 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 — even though the focus has been shifting toward science and away from social issues for years, the couple says, well before the 2024 election.

“So we basically looked at the science funding ecosystem and decided that the area where we could have the biggest impact was in tool development,” Zuckerberg said. “And particularly working on long-term projects, 10 to 15 years, whose outcome addressed a biological challenge that would produce a tool that scientists around the world could use to accelerate the pace of science.”

Earlier this year, the organization scrubbed mentions of DEI from its website, including a statement saying that “people of color and marginalized communities have experienced a long history of exploitation in the name of scientific research, and indeed science itself has been deployed as a tool of oppression.” »

“Going forward, Biohub will be our primary philanthropic effort and where we will devote the vast majority of our resources,” Zuckerberg and Chan said in a blog post Thursday. “We will also continue our other philanthropic efforts, but the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will serve as infrastructure and support for our initiatives.”

Zuckerberg and Chan’s increased commitment to scientific research comes as the Trump administration has cut billions of dollars in scientific research and public health funding.

Chan, who had worked as a pediatrician treating children with rare diseases, said that what she wanted “more than anything was a way to see what was happening inside their cells – how genetic mutations were expressed in different cell types and what, exactly, was going bad.”

“Until now, this kind of understanding has been out of reach. AI is changing that. For the first time, we have the potential to model and predict the biology of diseases in ways that reveal what’s wrong and how to develop new treatments to fix it,” she said.

On Thursday, Chan and Zuckerberg also announced that Biohub was acquiring EvolutionaryScale, an AI research lab that has created large-scale AI systems for the life sciences. Alex Rives, co-founder of EvolutionaryScale, will serve as Biohub’s chief scientist, leading research efforts in experimental biology, data and artificial intelligence. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Biohub’s ambition for the years and decades to come is to create virtual cell systems that would not have been possible without recent advances in AI. In the same way that large language models learn from vast databases of digital books, online writings and other media, its researchers and scientists work to build 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 then conduct virtual experiments on a scale not possible in physical laboratories.

Noting that Biohub was launched when the couple had their first child, Chan listed some of the organization’s accomplishments, from creating the largest single-cell dataset to contributing to one of the largest maps of human cells, to building sensors to measure real-time inflammation in living cells and researching rare diseases.

This work continues, with a focus on using AI to advance biomedical research.

“And to anchor it on the impact on patients, you know, why do that?” Chan said. “It’s like, why is a virtual cell 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 push the forefront of medicine for humans — and that’s so promising.”