New biomedical research hub to tackle ‘grand challenges’

Anew biomedical research hub in Chicago will bring together the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with the goal of solving grand challenges in science on a 10- to 15-year time horizon.

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago will build upon the successes of the first Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, and it is the first to expand the CZ Biohub Network out of California.

“We are excited to scale this successful model of collaborative science into a larger network by welcoming the new Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in Chicago,” said Priscilla Chan, MD, co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Intiative (CZI). “This institute will embark on science to embed miniaturized sensors into tissues that will allow us to understand how healthy and diseased tissues function in unprecedented detail.

“This might feel like science fiction today, but we think it’s realistic to achieve huge progress in the next 10 years,” she said. “I look forward to the advances in science and technology that this new Biohub will spur in studying how tissues function to understand what goes wrong in disease and how to fix it.”

CZ Biohub Chicago will focus on engineering technologies to make precise, molecular-level measurements of biological processes within human tissues, with an ultimate goal of understanding and treating the inflammatory states that underlie many diseases.

“The Chicago Biohub will create technologies that will transform our understanding of tissue-scale biology, revealing important information about the processes that take place in living tissues that could lead to new therapies,” said CZI co-founder and co-CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

CZ Biohub Chicago will differ from the traditional academic research funding model; instead of solely splitting funding across faculty labs at different universities, it will create a new shared laboratory space in Chicago that will bring together staff scientists with expertise from the partner universities. Academic labs will also receive funding for individual faculty-led projects.

The center will initially focus on inflammation and the function of the immune system.

Inflammation and overactive immune cells play a key role in many diseases, including cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and are also implicated in organ failure, diseases of the skin, type 2 diabetes and severe infectious diseases like COVID-19. But inducing inflammation in a controlled way can also be used to combat disease: in cancer immunotherapy, the immune system is unleashed and directed toward tumors.

The engineered platforms that will be developed at CZ Biohub Chicago will combine several state-ofthe-art technologies to make the first holistic and direct measurements of inflammation in human tissue.

“A thorough understanding of tissue inflammation is a holy grail of human biology it would lead the way to design treatments for a myriad of diseases and disorders,” said Jeffrey Hubbell, PhD,

Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering in the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and member of the executive committee for CZ Biohub Chicago.

The inaugural Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco was founded in 2016 in partnership with Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of California, San Francisco. Its cell atlas project led the development of the first whole organism cell atlases in humans, mice, flies and lemurs, and its infectious disease project helped accelerate California’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.