Schmidt Futures, founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, has announced a $50 million collaboration with Citadel CEO Ken Griffin to fund two focused research organizations (FROs) that will work to accelerate biomedical and disease research.

FROs are business ventures created to solve specific scientific and technological challenges that require the scale, unity, and drive of a startup without the need to generate short-term profits, while working to solve problems in fundamental research for public benefit. The funding to Convergent Research, a nonprofit science incubator created by Schmidt Futures in 2021, will support the launch of the Parallel2 Technology Institute to measure proteins with single-cell resolution at a cost 100 times lower than currently available, with the goal of understanding protein dysfunctions that cause diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and EvE Bio to create a publicly available dataset of drug and human protein interactions, with the goal of reducing pharmaceutical side effects and boosting treatment efficacy.

“FROs can advance bold projects and scientific breakthroughs for public benefit, which otherwise would fall in the critical gap between for-profit startups and government-sponsored research,” said Eric Schmidt. “If we solve scientific bottlenecks through FROs, we could unlock major advances in human health, climate change, biosecurity, and more.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Christoph Burgstedt)