Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s foundation is funding the construction of a massive computer system for medical research consisting of over 1,000 advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) of the H100 type used in AI-focused servers.
The initiative, launched by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), aims to enable groundbreaking medical discoveries that could help treat, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century.
The new GPUs are intended to provide researchers with access to generative artificial intelligence for studying healthy and diseased cells, using predictive models for human cells, researchers can understand how the body responds to diseases or new medications.
This is akin to running a virtual cell through multiple simulation processes to understand potential outcomes, as explained by Chan and Zuckerberg in an article for MIT Technology Review.
Chan stated in a press release, “Artificial intelligence models predict how the immune cell responds to infection, the cellular-level effects of a rare disease in children, or even how a patient’s body reacts to a new drug.” These tools are typically prohibitively expensive for many scientists, and this is something the initiative aims to change.
The new GPUs, funded by the Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Foundation, are expected to accelerate medical research and encourage collaborative efforts among scientists, they will be used to analyze open-source human cell models, allowing researchers to work together more effectively.
Biohub Network, a CZI initiative that brings together various technology and scientific institutions, will oversee these GPUs, it is focused on addressing major scientific challenges over a time frame of 10 to 15 years.
Artificial intelligence has been utilized in life sciences for years, with platforms like Google’s AlphaFold predicting protein structures and Nvidia’s RadImageGAN discovering a wide range of medical conditions, including stroke, heart attacks, and cancer.
