Zuckerberg Announces Plan to Cure Diseases Nobody's Heard Of

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's Biohub will open a new funding round for rare diseases. This follows their ongoing partnership with Every Cure, which uses AI to repurpose existing drugs. Mark Zuckerberg wants to cure diseases that affect so few people most doctors couldn't spell them without Google.

Every Cure specializes in drug repurposing. They feed algorithms old pharmaceuticals and hope something sticks to a disease affecting twelve people in Manitoba. The Biohub thinks this deserves more money. They're expanding the partnership because apparently solving problems for 0.0000002% of the population scales better than fixing Instagram's comment section.

Rare disease research costs millions per patient helped. The math works like this: spend forty million dollars, help nineteen people, call it philanthropy, write it off, repeat. Zuckerberg made his fortune convincing people to share photos of their lunch. Now he's convincing scientists to cure diseases named after the three German doctors who discovered them in 1847.

The Biohub will accept grant applications from researchers studying conditions you can't pronounce. AI will scan through expired patents looking for drugs that failed at treating common diseases but might accidentally work on something affecting two hundred Norwegians. This is cutting-edge science: throwing old medicine at new problems until the press release writes itself.

Every Cure's model depends on repurposing drugs that pharmaceutical companies abandoned. These are medications that couldn't cure anything profitable. Now they get a second chance at diseases so rare they don't have awareness ribbons. The ribbon manufacturers couldn't justify the minimum order.

Retail traders can't invest in the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative because it's a limited liability company disguised as charity. They'll have to settle for buying Meta stock and pretending Zuckerberg's altruism will somehow affect the share price. It won't, but at least nineteen Norwegians might live longer.

Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash