Chan Zuckerberg Biohub commits $500M over five years to build open, AI-ready predictive models of the human cell.
Key Takeaways
Split: $100M funds external coordinated data generation; $400M funds internal imaging, instrumentation, and tissue engineering tech at Biohub.
Partners include Allen Institute, Arc Institute, Broad Institute, Wellcome Sanger, Human Cell Atlas, Human Protein Atlas, and NVIDIA for compute.
Data generated will be open and freely available, modeled on precedents like the Protein Data Bank and Human Genome Project.
Core technical bets: cryo-electron tomography for atomic-level cell resolution, and microscopy capable of imaging millions to billions of cells in living tissue.
The Billion Cells Project (17 institutions, launched 2025) is an existing precursor; this initiative scales that model across proteomics, genomics, transcriptomics, and spatial data.
