TLDR · SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

BIOHUB FOR NON-BIOLOGISTS: BEHIND PRISCILLA CHAN AND MARK ZUCKERBERG'S PLAN TO CURE ALL DISEASES

latent.space68 min read

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's Biohub has a billion dollars a year to make several long-horizon bets on basic science. Its aim is to change our understanding of immunological science and open up the door to engineering human health, simulating immune therapies, reprogramming dysfunctional cells, and preventing diseases before they arise. It has opened up three models on its virtual cells platform: VariantFormer, a model that directly translates personal genetic variations into tissue-specific gene activity patterns; CryoLens, a large-scale model for cryoET that provides unsupervised structural similarity analysis; and scLDM, a model that can generate realistic single-cell data in silico at unprecedented fidelity. A transcript of an interview with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, where they discuss the Biohub secret master plan, is available in the article.