YouSaid · the spoken record

Priscilla Chan

lines on the record: 62
first: 2026-07-09
most recent: 2026-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, is Father Markup, if we didn't exist, would it be a problem? Yes, like those questions really land. As a BC, it's like one of us as an engineer, the other one, a scientist, doctor. Yeah, very in this direction. Yeah.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there's just going to be a huge amount of leverage with AI, and it is, yeah, it still seems like there could be a lot more effort in the space around building tools and just accelerate the whole thing a lot better.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, yeah, it's a real kind of void. I mean, there's this whole pipeline that needs to exist from accelerating basic science to funding a lot of people to use it to then you can get into the biotechs that basically can start to work on basically coming up with novel therapies and then you get the pharma companies that do them at scale. And then there's a space for philanthropy on the other side of public health of basically taking the the the the the the the the the the therapies and and kind of bring them out to everyone in the world but this is a a space that”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data sets to take advantage of AI in large language models, that's because of all the work that we have been doing. And so being able to continue moving forward in this ambiguity and sometimes lack of signal on a big goal, like I think we sort of set the DNA for that. Amazing. Oh, no pun intended.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was still envious because that was, I was like, I craved that feedback, am I doing a good job? And, you know, 10 years in, you know, the reason why we're doubling down on biology is like not only did we achieve what we said we were going to do and when we set out to set out on these projects, it actually delivered more than we thought we were going to. And I was like, okay, that's a signal I can latch on to. And like, that's a signal we can really continue doubling down and doing more of that. And so I think it's continuing to tolerate the early ambiguity when you're like, okay, I'm going to do more of this. And being patient, but being willing to have a long time horizon but be impatient at the same time because it's all those iterations along the way that have sort of allowed us to get to this place where, you know, to get lucky, ready, having built data.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's been really interesting in the past 10 years because I actually spent the first few years completely envious of people working for for-profit companies. Because there's so much clarity. Like the market will tell you whether or not it's private or public will tell you if you're doing a good job.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at individual labs, they'll have like. Like a large lab would have tens of GBUs. And we were the first to really build a large-scale compute cluster. We have plans to move to the 10,000 range. And that one requires a different type of project, obviously. You're able to ask different types of questions. And it's a resource that we use, but also we've invited scientists to apply and say like, what question do you have that could use this amount of resource and be able to sort of seed collaborations that way?”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, physics is where we got a lot of the inspiration. Like, physics has just historically been, like, labs have just rallied around big projects and big shared resources. And we will, you know, we are relatively centralized, but we still depend on a lot of labs who are doing sort of exact frontier work or complementary work to come together to support those. There's that. But one more thought on your expansion question is like, and maybe this is like the modern AI lab, we are not expanding like a lot of square footage per se, but we're expanding our compute.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's just really kind of simple stuff, but I think it's It's sort of novel as a model, and one of the things that's so we've now copied this from the first biohub to the biohub network and expanded it to other models, but it's also just been neat to see. Other folks who are working in the field also adopt similar models because it's a pretty intuitive thing. But at some point, you'll reach the point where actually it's really good to have decentralized work too, right? So it shouldn't be that we're not saying that this is the way that all science should work. We're just saying that there's a space for this that can unlock a lot of value because it, for whatever reason, hasn't been the default. And we still rely on.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting how many organizational questions or problems you can fix just by having two teams sit together, right? It's like, it doesn't matter what the org chart is or like whatever. It's like you guys need to sit next to each other until you get this thing to work.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think a lot of what we've found is that figuring out ways to encourage collaboration in ways that otherwise seem very simple but weren't happening before can unlock a lot of value. So the very first bio hub What we did, there were two kinds of interesting things. One was it was this collaboration between UCSF Stanford and Berkeley. And there are all these really smart people at all these different places who previously, I guess in theory they could have figured out a way to work together, but there was not really a formal construct for them to do that. And this just allowed a lot more collaboration. The other one is cross-discipline, basically having biologists sit next to engineers. And this view that like these two disciplines are things that need to”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the rest of the field is doing because you kind of think about science as it's this portfolio, right? Society has a portfolio of stuff that it's trying to do. And as in terms of philanthropy, You want to be the most additive that you can be by trying to figure out what else is underrepresented. So science by default is very decentralized, right? It's like kind of the way that granting has worked, the way that I think scientists by default want to work.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably a little of both. And we've added new bio hubs over time. And then we're also building up more of this central AI team. I think that these organizational questions of how do you set this up are fascinating. And a lot of our approach is sort of informed by”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything So, you need to be able to allow the immunologists to come in and understand neurodegeneration and understand how their world fits in. And so the more you lower the barrier to entry allows people to actually think in a sort of Truly collaborative and interdisciplinary way.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lower and lower barrier entry for people to say, you know, like, I have some knowledge about this. Maybe I can contribute. A very pertinent example is turns out I think immunology has a ton to do with neurodegeneration, right?”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The user interface is actually really important. You talked about you guys have a founder who's using Cell by gene. That user interface was intentionally designed to not need to have a computational or really a very deep biological background to be able to use because you want people coming from different fields to look at the problem. Look here, help us solve problems here. And so building the user interface in a way where it's not a very high barrier to entry to be able to poke around and learn something and bring knowledge back to your work, that's intentional. And we're really hoping when we build these virtual models that we get to a place where we can”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On how you talk to a scientist, right? Like, so because you have to not only know the data and the model and so forth, but like the conversation is what we keep finding out ends up being very, very important. So rich.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In biology, it used to be, or at least one assumption was all the data sets aren't on the internet. So part of the reason you need a domain specific model is that the data sets are not public. You guys are kind of bucking that trend too by creating a lot of open source. Access to the data, and then even then it sounds like you're betting on the trend that we're seeing in other industries, but still there will be nuance in how you annotate that data, I curate that data. Well, on how you talk to scientists.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, it's so interesting because that is exactly like that has been the biggest surprise in the industry for us in AI world, like forget biology for one second, is that the domain specific models have been super interesting. The original thesis, well, there's just some AIs are going to get so smart. They're going to be smarter than everybody at everything. But like on video models, like every video model is best at something, but not everything. And so knowing what problem you're solving actually turns out to be sort of ironically very important in AI because you can actually get to a way better result. If you put the two together, like, yeah, we're seeing that over and over again in a way that is, I would say, very counterintuitive to the whole narrative kind of going into it.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so they're obviously amazing groups during Frontier AI and a lot of groups doing great frontier biology. And we think we can do uniquely is actually tie these two together. And we've funded data sets. We've built data sets. We're like building the instrumentation now to. And so, if we can close that loop, which is our goal in bringing everyone together, I think it's going to be incredibly powerful. And it's more than just writing down a spec and saying like, please deliver this. Like these people need to be sort of working shoulder to shoulder and shaping each other's work for this to actually be the. More and more accurate model of how the human cell works.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mission to see if we could help the scientific community cure and prevent diseases by the end of the century. I do think with the advances in AI, that should be possible to do significantly sooner. And that is a very worthy and important and very exciting goal that we think we kind of have a unique place in the ecosystem that we can help empower others to make fast progress on that.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, he's great. And then the other thing is the piece that I mentioned earlier, which is just, yeah, I mean, CCI has focused on a number of different things. We've really just found over time that we feel like we've been able to make the biggest difference in science. So we've just kept on doubling down on it. And we're going to continue doing work in education. We're going to continue supporting local communities in those different pieces. But going forward, the bio hub is really going to be the main thrust of our philanthropy. And we're very excited about that because I think that this is, there has been, you know, when we started,”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the big news is thinking about how we are going to be coming together as one team. And, you know, in the past, we have done, we've run BioHubs and we've done built software. We've done some AI research. But all of it has been really thinking has been a little bit decentralized. But now under Alex's leadership, we are going to come together as the biohub an operating philanthropy where we are doing the science in service of a singular goal together and how do we actually advance the state of biology and research at the intersection of AI and biology.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That makes a lot of sense because also as you get into personalization, you've got common proteins combining into a unique cell so that makes it like from a system standpoint that makes it much more manageable. That makes a lot of sense. Interesting.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of the hypothesis is that you can look at all these different cells and you can kind of simulate how they might behave, but you're going to have a somewhat shallow understanding unless you actually have this hierarchical understanding of what the subcomponents of the cells are going to interact. Our view is that you basically want to build up a state of the art protein model and then have that be a part of the state of the art cellular model. And then once you have that, you build things like the virtual immune system, which allows you to simulate much more complicated systems. But it's sort of this hierarchical approach to building up these virtual models.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, the. Yeah. I thought you were saying if the reasoning model doesn't work, why? I mean, I think I mean, the language model analogy for that would be you need better kind of world models or better pre-trained models in order to get the reasoning to be good. But yeah, you build more. You build more capabilities into it. And I think that there's probably an order too. So the work that Alex and the evolutionary scale folks worked on is a lot of it is protein, which is interesting because that's at a kind of smaller resolution obviously than the cellular data cell atlus.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's actually, yeah, no, that's a fascinating one, too. Because one of the new models, I think this one is very early, but it's basically the first reasoning model over biology. So the idea is that, yeah, you effectively have these models that kind of simulate world models in different ways. And then you want it to be able to not just Be able to spit out correlations right in terms of what it's found, but actually be able to kind of reason through how things would evolve and why things would happen. I think that one's quite early, but it is interesting conceptually as what I think is clearly going to be an important direction in terms of how these models evolve.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another one of the models is it's this diffusion model. Basically, you can describe a type of cell that you would like it to simulate, and it will just produce a kind of synthetic model of the cell. Again, I mean, it's kind of interesting because to Priscilla's point before about how everyone is different and different cells have kind of, you know, you want to be able to simulate these kind of rare configurations, having at least a synthetic version of what that could look like is interesting and then you can test against that. The cryo model, I think, is interesting because it's spatial. So it kind of gives you a sense of there are all these different models that you can have that allow you to Basically, look at different kinds of things, and then you just train them in to be increasingly general over time.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly And just like the language models, you build in specific capabilities. So it's not, so for example, you know, one of the models that we're publishing is variant former, right? It basically makes it so that it's trained on a bunch of effectively pairs if you have a cell, you apply CRISPR to it in a place, you see what comes out at the other side. So it basically is able to make that kind of a prediction. Like, okay, if you have this edit that you're doing to a cell, what is likely going to happen?”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it will obviously iterate and get better and better because right now we like right now we're still just talking about transcriptomics we're expanding into different ways of looking at the cell but you get more and more accuracy but I don't think it needs to be 100% accurate to be useful because you just want to be able to de-risk the idea on the front end a little bit and the more and more you de-risk it the more efficient it gets obviously but it will be useful if you even get directional signal and yes we do think about it like as a model organism but in a way that's like Has fidelity to the human body. Like, you know, like, I don't want”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hitting like a certain percentage of the time to make tenure or publish or whatever they need to do. But if you had a virtual cell model where you could simulate really high quality biology, you could actually then start testing and tinkering on the computational side and like ask riskier questions, things that would have been expensive and costly in terms of time and resources to do in the lab, and actually see if there is promise doing the experiments in silico before you make the time and money investment in the wet lab. Do you think it kind of kind of”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know, you guys think about risk all the time in terms of when you make investments, like I think the promise of being able to do virtual biology using a virtual cell model is you can actually take on riskier ideas. Right now, like grant funding can be hard to come by and the wet lab work is expensive and slow and it's not just money, it's also time. And so you have to choose something that you think is going to have some likelihood of success to keep your lab career going. And so it naturally lends people to take on like some risk, but not a lot of risk because they need to make sure that they are”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understanding the way that that kind of cells look in different states. And eventually, just like you have this analogy on the kind of the industry side or on language models where you have different capabilities and then over time you train them into models and it gets more and more general, that's kind of the idea here. So we'll build the bio hubs around grand biological challenges. The biohubs will build tools that will generate novel data sets. We will build models based on those and then eventually combine the models into an increasingly general view of a virtual cell that will be useful both for scientists and hopefully startups and companies that are working on finding drugs, which is not our part of the whole thing.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of AI, I think, just kind of speaks a little bit to where we think the relative weight of these things is. But, I mean, we basically view, you know, like Priscilla was saying with the different bio hubs, New York doing cellular engineering will basically make it so that you can have cells that can record different things that are going on around the body and share that data and then you can build that into models. The Chicago BioHub being able to record inflammation and basically study that in order to kind of help understand That's a different data set. We have the imaging institute, which is what we just trained our first set of models around that, which are the first spatial models around.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting when you think about it, where it's like you have AI and biology coming together, and really it's like an AI person who understands biology as running it rather than a biologist who has some.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just different structures in the cell to whole virtual immune system or different levels of hierarchy. And we knew that this is going to end up being like a very important set of tools for people to effectively generate hypotheses for different science work. Even before you get to the point where you're really running full experiments in it, you can come up with some estimate of how that might run. It will be useful for some of the precision medicine type examples that Priscilla was talking about a few minutes ago. But we think that this is like probably one of the most important sets of tools that you need to build. And it's not a single thing, right? So there's different angles to come at this from. The cell atlas data is helpful for understanding things on a cellular level. One of the kind of most important things that we're doing right now,”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very important when we were getting started with the work to have everyone who was doing it have a consistent format. So that way it could be used. Portable. And then once that kind of took off as the way that it would get done, then other people just found it.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we put the data that we collected publicly so people could share. But because everyone started using the same annotation tool, everyone was standardized then on the same data formats. And then there started being a community around the tool, and they wanted to share back and build the Atlas. So now after 10 years, there are millions of cells that have been built into this shared resource for the entire scientific community. We only funded about 75% of it. Sorry, that's wrong. We've only funded 25% of it. 75% came from the broader community saying this is useful. And there's an easy way for us to standardize and build these together. That's right An interesting”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was 10 years ago. And then we seeded a few labs to start building out that data set. But we were like, there are like millions or billions of different cell types and different permutations. Like how are we going to do this? And especially with like a burgeoning technique. And so we ended up seeding a few groups and they started doing work. And then they told us they had a problem. There was a bottleneck in their workflow because they couldn't annotate the data fast enough. And so we built, cell by gene was an annotation tool. It's the original source of this. So we built the annotation tool to make it easy for people who are doing single cell science to be able to annotate the data.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the single cell orc was one of our first RFAs 10 years ago we started, and we were like, okay, we think this is possible. We actually funded the methodology for it to standardize how it was going to be done.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where in 2025, and there's not the kind of periodic table of elements equivalent for biology, right? So that was sort of a lot of the inspiration of it was, all right, how do we both through work that we're going to do in the biohub and through other grants, be able to pull together and standardize a format where you can have all this data? And when we were starting off, we didn't even necessarily have in mind that we were going to use that to build virtual cell models. I think that that's sort of just come into focus as the AI work has advanced. But that's a very exciting thing. We should definitely spend a bunch of time on the virtual cell models. But I'm not sure what you wanted to get into on the cell atlas.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sell by gene is like almost an accident though. So, do you want to share a little bit about Selwyn, or do you want me to start”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Built amazing data sets, I have to say. You may not hear the feedback from the startup community and the pharma community and the R&D community, but it's there because you've committed to open source. And so people may not be, they may not all be writing papers, but they are using those tools. There's a startup in our portfolio working on idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The name tells you how vexing the disease is. It's idiopathic. We don't know why it happens.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have that level of understanding. But truly, each one of our biology is different. And say, like, if you look at hypertension or depression, we kind of just go by trial and error and saying, like, let's just try that drug and see what happens. But what should really happen is being able to precisely and accurately and quickly treat people by looking at individuals' biology. We want to enable the basic science and we would be thrilled if people picked up the models that we build to be able to build the diagnostics, the therapeutics that need to come.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Target effects? What are the side effects? Because you also know where else that drug will be able to interact with the body. And so those are rare, like, and but I really think most diseases should be thought of as rare diseases because each one of our biology is different. And right now we just get lumped, right? We get lumped based on age, demographics, ancestry. If we're lucky”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, horrible. And you're like, you tell someone, you kind of know something, but we don't know what it means. But if you look at the way we've been able to look at variants and look at single-cell transcriptomics, we're starting to be able to say, okay, this variant actually impacts this set of downstream cells. And then we start looking at the proteins that get expressed and how it looks similar or different to what a healthy cell would look like. Then you can start targeting, okay, like let's look at that as a target. And you both know the specificity of the target you want to build based on the ability to connect mutation to protein expression, as well as to be able to predict”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want there to be an explosion of a community who are building these just the new wave of what it means to be deploying precision medicine. I think for rare diseases and common diseases alike, you're really talking about individual biology that we sort of lump together. And we often don't know how it happens, right? We know that you have this mutation or the worst nightmares. You have a variant of unknown significance. What does that even mean?”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interdisciplinary. And sort of unconstrained by the traditional lab, but we also build off of the labs at these academic institutes that support the work. And so that's how we sort of choose the grand challenge and the locations. And then the sort of layering and the large language models in AI coming into the picture has been so interesting because we were already building tools to measure interesting data, building the data sets, but we didn't really know what to do with them yet. And large language models coming onto the scene were like, wow, we can make sense of all of this now.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like we have some risk appetite, right? So we want things where we're like, there's a credible pathway, someone who is at the helm who can do this. And there's enough ambiguity where we feel like we could take on that risk. And if we do it, like the returns could be higher than even expected. And the way we model that in the biohubs is we have three biohubs. We have one in San Francisco, one in Chicago, one in New York. The one in New York works on cell engineering. Can we engineer cells to go in and detect signals, read it out, or to take certain actions? In Chicago, we're building tissues and looking at cell communications within tissues. And then in San Francisco, we're looking at deep imaging and transcriptomics. And that work, the locations are not by accident. We also look at the partner universities because we have folks who come to the biohubs to do this work collaborative.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm curious how you guys think about it, but for us, when we looked at the grand challenges from the 10 to 15 year time horizon, it needs to be like, when you look at it, you're like, I see a path. Not everything needs to be solved for us to take it on. In fact, if everything's solved, then that feels like that should just go.”
2026-07-09 · a16z Podcast · Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Help Cure Disease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source