Zuckerberg's philanthropic venture unveils AI world model for drug discovery

By Jaspreet Singh

May 27 (Reuters) - Biohub, ‌a philanthropic venture ​of ​Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, launched on Wednesday a world model of protein biology to accelerate drug discovery.

Proteins ‌are the body's essential molecular machinery, performing diverse roles from building structures ⁠to generating energy. But designing new proteins that are stable and effective in the body has ‌remained a scientific challenge.

Biohub said its ‌world model is built on the fourth generation of evolutionary scale modeling, or ESM, which learns from the protein sequences produced by evolution and uses that ​knowledge to understand protein biology.

"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 told Reuters.

Pharmaceutical firms are increasingly turning to AI to boost research and development, ​betting on new modeling tools and automated labs ‌to improve efficiency.

Biohub's world model is comprised of open-source AI models, which collectively advance the scientists' understanding and ability to design proteins.

Its ⁠researchers used these AI models to design new protein binders for cancer and immune targets, which effectively reactivate immune cells in lab tests.

"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," Biohub's head of science Alex Rives told Reuters.

The models ‌will also be available on platforms including AWS Bio Discovery and SandboxAQ.

Founded in 2015, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative unified its biomedical ‌research efforts under Biohub in November 2025 — including the acquisition of AI-biology startup EvolutionaryScale.

The couple ⁠has committed over $7 billion to charity ‌since 2015. They have ​also pledged to give away 99% of their Meta shares over their lifetime primarily through Biohub.

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; editing by ‌Alan Barona)

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