Stanford is one of three Bay Area universities to participate in a new collaboration announced today by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. That’s the initiative created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, MD, after the birth of their daughter in 2015.
When it launched, the Initiative focused on education, but today they unveiled a broader focus on science. The first investment will be the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub – a collaboration between Stanford, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley.
“The Biohub will be the sinew that ties together these three institutions in the Bay Area like never before,” said Stephen Quake, PhD, a Stanford professor of bioengineering and of applied physics, who will co-lead the Biohub with Joseph DeRisi, PhD, professor and chair of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF.
Each of the three partner schools has a long history of developing biomedical technologies, with combined strengths in medicine, engineering and the basic sciences. New opportunities created by the Biohub will focus the universities’ individual strengths around the common goal of developing technologies to cure and prevent human disease.
The Biohub will include a combination of research space focused on biotechnology tools development, grants and large-scale collaborative projects. The headquarters will be in the San Francisco Mission Bay district, with an outstation here known as the Stanford Biohub.
“With this extraordinary commitment, we are closer than ever to beating disease,” said Lloyd B. Minor, MD, dean of the School of Medicine. “These resources will support the kind of curiosity-driven basic research that has led to history’s most important health advances – and the remarkably talented minds behind it.”
Resident scientists will focus on large-scale overarching projects focused on human health challenges. The Biohub will also fund Chan Zuckerberg Investigators to support high-impact projects that are too exploratory to receive government support.
Photo of Steven Quake and Joseph DeRisi by Tyler Mallory