Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan want to find ways to "cure all disease," and will put $3 billion into the lofty goal over the next 10 years through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and Chan, a philanthropist and pediatrician, said they want to accomplish their goal in their children's lifetime, according to a TIME article.
“That doesn’t mean that no one will ever get sick. But it does mean that our children and their children should get sick a lot less,” Chan said.
The first project will be an effort to create tools that will measure diseases and help treat them. That project will be conducted by the University of California, San Francisco, UC Berkeley and Stanford University with funding of $600 million.
Some of the examples of tools that can make a difference, added Zuckerberg, include artificial intelligence to grow understanding of the human body and use of chips to diagnose disease.
AI, along with big data, is poised to be one of the technologies that will have the biggest effect on healthcare leading into 2017, according to a report by Silicon Valley Bank.
SVB surveyed founders, executives and investors in health-tech companies and found that most see promise for growth in healthcare IT in the year ahead.
In addition, 61 percent said they see venture capital leading to the most funding opportunities for health IT companies. But 37 percent said patient and provider adoption remain barriers in the industry.