DOE to invest more than $500 million; NIH to coordinate relevant datasets
Biohub, the nonprofit co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg, announced Wednesday a $1.8 billion partnership with the Energy Department, the National Institutes of Health, and other funding partners to build biological data ready for artificial-intelligence models. Biohub said the investment will go toward funding, data, computation, and new measurement technology, with the goal of providing datasets that allow researchers to use AI models to find new ways of preventing and treating diseases.
As part of the investment, the Energy Department will invest more than $500 million across five years in lab measurement, modeling, and computation to build an AI-ready open data resource, according to Biohub. The National Institutes of Health will coordinate the contribution of relevant datasets, repositories, and knowledge bases developed through more than $500 million in prior federal investment aligned to the initiative, Biohub said.
Biohub said it will work with NIH to standardize the datasets for AI model training. The organization said the investment may pave the way for a greater understanding of disease and open up new paths for cures.
“An accurate predictive model of biology could dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientists to perform experiments digitally,” Biohub’s head of science Alex Rives said.