The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)—established by Facebook (now Meta) co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician—has announced a $250 million investment to establish a research institute in New York City dedicated to building technologies that will monitor health and help eradicate disease.

The fourth in the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York (CZ Biohub NY) will bring together researchers from Columbia, Rockefeller, and Yale universities to create technologies that characterize and bioengineer immune cells—with the goal of creating disease-specific “cellular endoscopes” that can detect early stages of disease in cells, monitor cell changes, and resolve diseases before they become untreatable. In addition to CZI funding, the State of New York and New York City are each contributing $10 million to the institute.

After great successes, cancer immunotherapies have become more mainstream therapies for certain forms of cancer. CZ Biohub NY aims to refine and amplify the ability to detect and decode subtle signs of early-stage disease that can elude conventional testing, as well as deliver treatment directly upon detection. New approaches will initially be applied to hard-to-detect diseases such as ovarian and pancreatic cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, aging, and autoimmunity.

Launched in 2016, the network includes institutions in San Francisco, Chicago, and the Chan Zuckerberg Institute for Advanced Biological Imaging in Redwood City, California, all of which aim to pursue science and technologies that quantify human biology in action and solve grand scientific challenges on a 10- to 15-year horizon.

“We’re thrilled to launch the New York Biohub, which will focus on harnessing our immune system to detect, prevent, and ultimately treat diseases before they advance,” said Chan. “Right now, diseases such as cancer and Parkinson’s are often diagnosed after the onset of obvious symptoms, making them harder or even impossible to treat. To change that, researchers and engineers at the New York Biohub will bioengineer immune cells to scout, report, and repair damage to our cells before it leads to serious illnesses. Solving ambitious challenges, like identifying diseases earlier when our options for treatment are far better, underpins our work across the Biohub Network, and we’re excited to continue to scale this collaborative research model with the New York Biohub.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/gorodenkoff)