|27 October 2016|
USA
Curing and preventing all diseases by the end of the century is the vision of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
The Biohub is the first major development by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the brainchild of paediatrician Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Bringing together the University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Francisco and Stanford – world leaders in biomedical and engineering innovation – the Biohub has now begun work on two game-changing projects.
Speaking in an article on Stanford news, Stanford biochemistry Professor Peter Kim said: “One is the cell atlas project, which has to do with identifying and characterizing all the different types of cells in the body. Using recently developed technologies, the project will not only characterize the cells, but identify the genes that are active in each cell type and manipulate the proteins to learn how the cells behave in health and disease states. Once it’s done, the cell atlas will be a tool available to scientists worldwide. The second project, which I’m leading, is on infectious disease. That project has four components: detect, respond, treat and prevent.”