Stanford University: Stanford continues work with expanding Chan Zuckerberg Biohub

Five years ago, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) launched the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a Bay Area research collaboration between Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The Biohub aims to better understand the fundamentals of disease and develop new technologies that could lead to more actionable diagnostics and effective therapies.

In a Dec. 7 announcement about new and renewed support for science and science technology, CZI revealed an extension of the Biohub’s operations through 2031. The announcement commended the collaboration’s work over the past five years on COVID-19 response, emerging diseases, whole-organism cell atlases and protein interactions within cells, among other projects.

Citing the success of the Biohub, CZI also announced the formation of a CZ Biohub Network. This will support the development of new Biohub collaborations in other locations to “take on grand scientific challenges in areas such as imaging, artificial intelligence, infectious disease research, cell biology and neuroscience while building new technologies and tools to tackle them,” according to the CZI press release.

As part of this effort, Steve Quake, the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and professor of applied physics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, will leave his position as co-president of the Biohub to become the CZ Biohub Network president. Quake has been on leave from Stanford since the Biohub was launched and will continue to be on leave. Current Biohub co-president Joe DeRisi, of UCSF, will assume sole leadership of the San Francisco-based institute.

“A central premise for the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub was to break down the silos that limit collaboration between great institutions, and to support creative, innovative and often risky research ideas,” said Quake in the press release. “We’re five years into this experiment, and the results tell us that we’re onto something. The CZ Biohub Network will scale this model to other regions so we can pursue the world’s toughest and most important scientific challenges.”