Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, got their first group of applicants for their Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. The organization is a non-profit medical research initiative. The new applicants applied to receive funding for research on deadly diseases.
The organization said Wednesday that $50 million would be donated in support of nearly 47 researchers from various universities including Berkley, University of California, and UCSF in San Francisco. The applicants range from scientists, engineer and even technologists who were chosen out of 700 others. Each will receive almost $1.5 million in “unrestricted” funding spanning out through 5 years which is part of the Biohub Investigator Program.
The Biohub Program created by the Zuckerberg’s forms an initiative of about $600 million that aims to gather researchers from all three Bay Area universities. The Biohub Initiative also supports having researchers partner up for medical research projects. It will be a building where researchers from all three universities will be able to work collaboratively on fighting and understanding disease.
Yet this is all part of an even larger initiative the Zuckerberg’s announced earlier in the fall. This $3 billion investment, that will span over the next 10 years, is set to help aid researchers with their projects. The bid for this initiative is to “cure, prevent, and manage all diseases.”
This goal to fund medical projects that would, in the end, help cure disease, is under the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It has been called one of the largest charitable projects that hopes to further human potential.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was launched with the hope of curing and managing nearly all disease by the end of the century. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative initially worked with educating African engineers as well as other technology companies in the past, which was a $24 million investment.
During the announcement of this new initiative, however, the Zuckerberg’s stressed that they are fully aware that they might not be able to cure or fully eradicate all disease. They do hope, as Priscilla Chan said, to “push back that boundary” that stands between certain diseases and human medical technology.
According to a source, the number of researchers that were chosen include 22 junior investigators and 25 senior investigators which will include 21 women and 26 men. The website for the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub says that his program will give these researchers the ability to “pursue their riskiest, most exciting ideas.”
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