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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, last year said they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charitable causes. Now they are putting a large chunk of that money to work. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the limited liability company into which Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan put their Facebook shares, on Wednesday said it would invest at least $3 billion over the next decade toward preventing, curing or managing all diseases by the end of the century. (Benner, 9/21)

The many components of the initiative include creating universal technology "tools" based on both traditional science and engineering on which all researchers can build, including a map of all cell types, a way to continuously monitor blood for early signs of illness, and a chip that can diagnose all diseases (or at least many of them). The money will also help fund what they referred to as 10 to 15 “virtual institutes” that will bring together investigators from around the world to focus on individual diseases or other goals — an idea that has the potential to upend biomedical science. (Cha, 9/21)

“This focus on building on tools suggests a road map for how we might go about curing, preventing and managing all diseases this century,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “Because if we can develop the new tools that allow us to see these categories of disease in new ways, we could empower scientists all over the world to make much faster progress.” One such tool is a “cell atlas” or a map of all the different cell types in the human body and their different states. (Seetharaman, 9/22)

Neuroscientist and geneticist Cori Bargmann was named the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s president of science and will be in charge of bringing together scientists and engineers to develop medical breakthroughs. Chan also announced that the initiative will spend an additional $600 million to establish a “bio hub” in San Francisco to support researchers from Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco as they develop new tools to understand and treat diseases. (Lien, 9/21)

The couple said their new philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, will attempt to bring scientists and engineers together, invent new technologies, and encourage the funding of basic science. “It doesn’t mean that no one will get sick,” Zuckerberg said. The goal, he said, would be to ensure that people get sick less often, or be able to better manage their diseases. (Love, 9/21)