Mark Zuckerberg’s BioHub Awarded $50 Million Grant To 47 Researchers For Their ‘Riskiest Ideas’

By Kara Thomas | Feb 13, 2017 06:00 AM EST

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Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan biomedical research named the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub is living up to its mission “to help cure, prevent or manage all disease in our children’s lifetime” and also “to invent the future of life science research.” With that goal, they gladly announced that they have awarded $50 million grant to 47 researchers for their “riskiest ideas.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub is an investigator program that will support scientists, technologists, and engineers in order to create treatment or cure for all kinds of diseases. This will be achieved through inventing new tools and techniques to improve scientific discoveries.

According to Nature, the CZ Biohub already awarded its first grant to those scientists for their study in different topics such as genomics of obscure microbes and also the memory-retrieval device. Reportedly, 47 researchers will be able to receive about $1.5 million in the next five years. That will give a total of $50 million.

The CZ Biohub is in partnership with three top universities namely, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of California at San Francisco. Biohub's co-leader, Stephen Quake said that they told the researchers to give their “riskiest ideas.”

There were more than 750 researchers from the three universities that submitted their proposals about fundamental biological processes and lead to disease-related technologies. Quake revealed that he and other grant reviewers checked the researcher’s track records. They are also in much favor for those researchers who have bold ideas with lack of preliminary evidence.

Fortune shared that the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub aims to focus on the Infectious Disease Initiative that aims to find treatment for pandemics such as Zika and Ebola. Aside from that it also focuses on the Cell Atlas. This is done wherein scientists will map every cell in the human body in order for them to have a better understanding of every disease.

Meanwhile, Jobs & Hire shared that if you wish to work and be part of Zuckerberg’s Facebook family you have to nail all their job interviews.

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