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Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan, announced on Wednesday plans to invest $250 million over 10 years to establish a new “biohub” in New York City focused on building a new class of cellular machines that can surveil the body and snuff out disease.

The new initiative, publicly revealed at the 2023 STAT Summit and previewed exclusively to STAT, is the latest program from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, a company the couple founded in 2015 to help cure, prevent, or manage all disease by 2100. It joins the original San Francisco Biohub founded in 2016 and a Chicago Biohub founded earlier this year.

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“About the five-year mark, we basically sat down and tried to assess what we thought was working well and what we want to double down on,” Zuckerberg told STAT. “And we thought that the Biohub model to bring a few universities together, coupling that with engineering and a long-term goal, was a model that was really doing well.”

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