Zuckerberg and Chan announce a New York biohub to build disease-fighting cellular machines

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• 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.

• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI

• particularly from single-cell sequencing, and did direct work on infectious disease

• in hopes of engineering cells that can detect and eventually treat conflagrations the immune system can’t see or can’t put out.

• Researchers will try to simulate these processes with organs-on-a-chip, on which cells migrate from a miniature bone marrow to miniature organs.

• they want to be able to engineer cells that only go to an organ of choice, perhaps by leveraging a version of the artificial receptors, CARs, which researchers now use to guide T cells to kill cancer cells.

• Potentially, they could “write” what they see and then die, leaching the DNA into the blood, which doctors could draw and sequence as dispatches from vital organs.

• Potentially, they could “write” what they see and then die, leaching the DNA into the blood, which doctors could draw and sequence as dispatches from vital organs.

• Then at the last moment, NYU pulled out.