The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub is investing $500 million over a five-year period in developing artificial intelligence models of human cells, tools that can be used to digitally investigate diseases at unprecedented speed beyond laboratory studies.
The non-profit organization, founded in 2016 by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan, revealed the funding program last week as part of the launch of a plan to freely distribute all the data created by the technology to researchers around the world.
The organization will allocate $400 million to its initiative, while another $100 million will be offered as grants to other researchers. Nvidia is listed as one of the project’s partners.
Alex Rives, head of science at Biohub, said the challenge ahead is fundamentally one of data scale. “To build artificial intelligence that can accurately represent the full complexity of biology, we need orders of magnitude more data than we have today,” he said in the announcement.
However, despite being the holder of the world’s largest single-cell dataset and having developed computing infrastructure specifically designed for biological research, the organization recognizes that such large investments should be made on a worldwide scale rather than just by Biohub.
If the model were accurate enough, it would serve as a kind of digital laboratory, where scientists could predict how cells react to various stimuli, stresses, diseases or new drugs without doing any experiments in real life.
Biohub suggests that this will help uncover the underlying mechanisms of some unknown diseases and find their treatments.
