The [1]Associated Press reports that "For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal — 'to cure, prevent or manage all disease' — if not in their lifetime, then in their children's."

During that decade they also funded other initiatives (including underprivileged schools and immigration reform), according to the article. But there's a change coming:

> Now, the billionaire couple is shifting the bulk of their philanthropic resources to Biohub, the pair's science organization, and focusing on using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. The idea is to develop virtual, AI-based 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 science work that we've done, the Biohub model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we have done. So we want to really double down on that. 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.... Chan and Zuckerberg have pledged 99% of their lifetime wealth — from shares of Meta Platforms, where Zuckerberg is CEO — toward these efforts...

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> On Thursday, Chan and Zuckerberg also announced that Biohub has hired the team at EvolutionaryScale, an AI research lab that has created large-scale AI systems for the life sciences... Biohub's ambition for the next years and decades is to create virtual cell systems that would not have been possible without recent advances in AI. Similar to how large language models learn from vast databases of digital books, online writings and other media, its researchers and scientists are working toward building virtual systems that serve as digital representations of human physiology on all levels, such as molecular, cellular or genome. As it is open source — free and publicly available — scientists can then conduct virtual experiments on a scale not possible in physical laboratories.

"We will continue the model we've pioneered of bringing together scientists and engineers in our own state-of-the-art labs to build tools that advance the field," [2]according to Thursday's blog post . "We'll then use those tools to generate new data sets for training new biological AI models to create virtual cells and immune systems and engineer our cells to detect and treat disease....

"We have also established the first large-scale GPU cluster for biological research, as well as the largest datasets around human cell types. This collection of resources does not exist anywhere else."



[1] https://apnews.com/article/chan-zuckerberg-philanthropy-biohub-evolutionaryscale-87c24eb349abcce8abec132b8538d7b0

[2] https://biohub.org/blog/founders-update-ai-powered-biology/