At this week’s Biocom California Converge Summit, Marc Malandro, chief operating officer of CZI and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network, and Sandy Schmid, chief scientific officer of CZ Biohub San Francisco, shared the organization’s progress toward its ambitious mission: to help scientists cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of this century.
“We had the idea to work with a collection of universities to harness the great work being done, develop a research institution with them as partners, do platform development, do science and have a research staff and an Investigator Program that allowed for really collaborative, high-risk, high-reward research. And we had something special.”
— Marc Malandro, CZI and CZ Biohub Network COO on the Biohub model
They reflected on CZI’s first major bet in science — the groundbreaking Biohub model — which champions cross-disciplinary collaboration, open science and strong university partnerships to drive faster, better science. The conversation also spotlighted CZI’s focus on four grand scientific challenges that are expected to unlock powerful new capabilities and usher in a new era of discovery in human health. Among these is the development of an AI-powered virtual cell designed to understand and predict cellular behavior.
“It’s going to revolutionize personalized medicine, it’s going to revolutionize drug discovery, it’s going to revolutionize the way we do experiments, make them more efficient and more focused.”
— Sandy Schmid, CZ Biohub SF chief scientific officer, on large language models for biology
Watch the video above.