A charitable foundation established by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced Wednesday the release of an artificial intelligence system designed to advance medical research and drug development.
The organization, called Biohub, introduced what it describes as a comprehensive model of protein biology that could help scientists create new treatments more efficiently. Proteins serve as the body’s fundamental building blocks, carrying out everything from structural support to energy production, but creating new proteins that remain stable and function properly in human bodies has long challenged researchers.
The new AI system operates using the fourth generation of what’s known as evolutionary scale modeling, or ESM, which analyzes protein patterns that have emerged through natural evolution and applies that information to better understand how proteins work.
“We’ve verified the model’s ability and validated many of its predictions in both immune diseases and cancer cases … It is very promising. We are hopeful that once these models are released, others will quickly adopt them to tackle some of the problems that they see in the lab,” Chan said in an interview.
Drug companies are increasingly incorporating artificial intelligence into their research operations, hoping that advanced modeling systems and automated laboratory equipment will make their development processes more effective.
The Biohub system consists of publicly available AI tools that work together to help scientists better understand and create proteins. Research teams have already used these tools to develop new protein compounds targeting cancer and immune system disorders, which have successfully reactivated immune cells during laboratory testing.
“We’re partnering with a number of different organizations that provide biological analysis platforms, and the models will be available there. But we also have a biohub.ai platform, enabling people to use the models on our servers. We will be providing compute credits for that purpose to researchers,” said Alex Rives, Biohub’s head of science.
The technology will also be accessible through other platforms including AWS Bio Discovery and SandboxAQ.
Established in 2015, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative consolidated its medical research activities under Biohub in November 2025, which included purchasing AI-biology startup EvolutionaryScale.
The couple has donated more than $7 billion to charitable causes since 2015 and has promised to donate 99% of their Meta stock holdings during their lifetimes, primarily through Biohub.
