The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funds a decade-long effort to map every human cell at single-cell resolution, partnering UCSF, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. CZI backs the Human Cell Atlas and builds software tools like Cell by Gene to speed up scientific work and make it reproducible.
Co-CEO and co-founder of CZI, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
When we say we want to cure, prevent, and manage all disease, our strategy is not disease by disease. Our strategy is how do we make all of science faster, accelerate the path to impact so that, um, we actually can get to that goal. When we started, we were like, okay, well, we're going to build a biohub collaboration between UCSF, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. We got these universities to partner together, bring their best and brightest to work on a a problem that's going to take 10 years to solve. Which is? Really understanding the cell at the single-cell level, both sort of in its innate state and under sort of perturbations, including infectious disease. We wanted to fund unmet needs, so we did grant funding. The academic system is really good at funding the first, getting that first cool paper in Nature, Science, Cell. That works and it's rewarded. But no one was really rewarding finishing complex problems. Human Cell Atlas falls into that category. Like the, The methodologies were out there, but like no one was excited to fund or incentivize completing an atlas, which is like millions and millions of cells. How could we support a burgeoning community to complete these atlases so they can be useful artifacts for everyone to use? We funded patients to help make biologists better. And then we built tools. We built a sort of industry-standard software engineering team, and we built tools like Cell by Gene, and we supported open source tools that help scientists do their work faster and better.
