New York partners with Facebook founder on $270M Biohub

A $270 million biomedical research facility to advance early disease prevention, detection and treatment is coming to the city, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Eric Adams and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced recently.

CZ Biohub NY will bring together researchers from Columbia University, the Rockefeller University and Yale University to focus on preventing and finding ovarian and pancreatic cancers and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s through engineering immune cells. The ultimate goal of the hub, according to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is to create disease-specific “cellular endoscopes” to detect early stages of disease in cells, monitor changes and resolve diseases before they become untreatable.

The CZI, established and owned by Mark Zuckerberg and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, will invest $250 million in the hub over the course of a decade, while the New York City Economic Development Corporation and Empire State Development will each kick in $10 million.

The New York facility will join the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network which includes institutes in San Francisco and Chicago. The city’s initiative was one project among 58 letters of intent from more than 170 institutions that CZI received when it decided to embark on creating another hub, according to Stephen Quake, head of science at CZI. New York was chosen by a panel of experts after becoming a finalist.

The project represents the city and state’s latest investment in the life sciences to stimulate the economy and modernize the sector: last year Hochul and Adams revealed plans for a $1.6 billion campus to be built in Kips Bay, and this past spring the governor unveiled plans for a $50 million lab in Midtown that will focus on expediting drug discovery. Earlier this month, Hochul announced a $98 million cell and gene therapy manufacturing facility will be housed at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo. You can read more here. 

 

We are excited that New York will be at the forefront of advanced early disease prevention, detection and treatment.