Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious $3bn aim to “cure, prevent and manage” all disease in one generation is about to take shape in a $600m “Biohub” in Silicon Valley.
The project’s conceit, that encouraging audacious science will usher in a “new era of accelerated progress in science and health”, is about to be tested. The first 47 researchers to receive grants, announced Wednesday, have a head-spinning diversity of specialties – from fields as far-flung as big data computer science to the biochemistry and nutrition of wheat.
The Biohub hopes to enable researchers to do “their most bold and innovative and most risky work”, said Joe DeRisi, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-president of the Biohub. “We expect a substantial number to fail – if there’s no failure, there’s no risk.”
The Biohub is an unusual setup for investigators. The University of California, San Francisco; University of California, Berkeley; and Stanford University have all partnered to bring researchers to one laboratory. There, a staff of engineers will be available to work with researchers in one location.
“If they’re doing National Institutes of Health work that might be a very different model of work,” DeRisi said.
Researchers are also required to make their draft publications available to other researchers to “accelerate scientific discovery”. Broadly, work will focus on prevention, treatment, diagnosis and rapid response to disease.
One grantee, Jure Leskovic, an associate professor in computer science at Stanford, said he could imagine how his work on virality in social networks could apply to predicting disease spread.
“For example, I’ve done a number of studies with Facebook about how information spreads,” Leskovic said. “You can think of information spread – like when Gangnam Style spreads through the network and gets immensely popular.
“A lot more data is available about spread of real disease,” Leskovic said. That understanding could be applied to “synergistically further the understanding of spread of infectious diseases”.
“Think of biology or cells – you can describe a good part of how it works through a complex network of interacting entities – how genes interact with each other, how proteins interact with each other, how diseases come to change proteins and genes,” he said.
Each researcher will receive about $1.5m, money that will help fund a portion of their research for five years. Unlike the NIH, which spends about 80% of its annual $32.3bn budget on science grants, the CZ Biohub will not renew applications. Researchers have one five-year shot at a breakthrough. This, DeRisi said, removes the “perverse incentive” for scientists to become risk-averse, as researchers look to meet goalposts for their next round of funding.
However, the project still has skeptics.
The announcement that Zuckerberg and his wife would provide $3bn of funding was described as “hubris” by some, as philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation have spent $3bn on HIV research and treatment alone.
“It doesn’t matter if you have the tool if you can’t use it and you can’t afford it,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist.
Gounder used the example of Pepfar, the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief. The program was started by former president George W Bush and delivered anti-retroviral drugs to millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa, helping stymy spread of the disease. However, Donald Trump’s team has expressed skepticism about the program.
“We’ve made a huge dent in reining in HIV in sub-Saharan Africa,” Gounder said. Now we’re facing a new administration that says it’s going to cut Pepfar. If they’re successful in cutting back on that program, we’re going to see HIV go right back up – and it’s not because we haven’t done the science.”
