Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announces $3 billion investment to cure disease

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has put $3 billion toward their goal of helping cure, prevent and manage all diseases in their children’s lifetime.

The money comes from the $45 billion organization Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan started last year to advance human potential and equality. The project will bring together teams of scientists and engineers “to build new tools for the scientific community” Priscilla Chan said on stage at an event in San Francisco.

Part of the $3 billion will go to a $600 million investment in Biohub, a new physical location that which will unite researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF with elite engineers to find new ways to treat disease.

The USA spends 50x more on treating people who are sick than curing diseases so people don’t get sick.

Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist from The Rockefeller University and the new head of Chan Zuckerberg’s science program, came out to explain how the $3 billion will be spent.

The majority of deaths are caused by heart disease, infectious disease, neurological disease, and cancer, so those are the areas where the program will concentrate its efforts.

The CZS will focus on building “transformational technologies” that could drive significant leaps in treatment and prevention. Zuckerberg said “It’s actually pretty easy to imagine what new tools we need to develop to make progress on the four major disease categories”.

The $3 billion investment will be spent over the next decade. For some perspective, it’s worth noting that the fiscal 2016 budget for the National Institutes of Health is more than $31 billion.

SOURCES- ChanZuckerberg Initiative, TuckCrunch