Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged more than $US3 billion ($4 billion) towards a plan to “cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children’s lifetime”.

Investments will include a bioscience research centre, and plans for a chip to diagnose diseases, continuous blood stream monitoring and a map of cell types in body.

“This is a big goal,” Mr Zuckerberg said at a San Francisco event hosted by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

“But we spent the last few years speaking with experts who think it is possible, so we dug in.”

Later on Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg outlined the initiative’s plans, saying he was “optimistic” all diseases could be cured or managed within his children’s lifetime.

“Today, just four kinds of diseases cause the majority of deaths. We can make progress on all of them with the right technology,” he wrote.
“Throughout history, most scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by the invention of new tools to help us see problems in new ways — like the telescope, the microscope and DNA sequencing.

“It’s not hard to imagine the modern tools required to accelerate breakthroughs in today’s four major disease areas.

“So we’re going to focus on bringing scientists and engineers together to build these new tools and technologies.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative could donate $US3 billion over the next decade, he said.

The first project will be named the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a $600 million research centre bringing together its own scientists and engineers, as well as those from Stanford, the University of California and Berkeley.

“We plan to invest billions of dollars over decades. But it will take years for these tools to be developed and longer to put them into full use,” he wrote.

“This is hard and we need to be patient, but it’s important.”