Mark Zuckerberg and Wife Priscilla Chan shower Chicago with $250M biohub promise

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, will sink $250 million into a new biotech hub in Chicago.

The couple’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced plans to launch its second life sciences research hub at a Chicago site that’s being kept under wraps for now, after the first in San Francisco started in 2021, CoStar reported.

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago, as it will be known, is a collaboration between the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It aims to develop technologies for studying and measuring human biology.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker is committing $25 million in state funding to the project.

“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,” Chan said in the statement.

The announcement comes as Chicago aims to join the ranks of major life science clusters in Boston, San Francisco and San Diego. Given its top universities, central location, large population and room to build on big development sites, Chicago leaders believe the region can become a leading biotech market.

The Chicago initiative will be led by Northwestern Professor Shana Kelley, who described the hub’s research goals as “wildly, but not impossibly, ambitious.”

Biohub Chicago will employ from 30 to 50 employees in a yet-to-be-determined location, a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative spokesperson told CoStar News in an email. It will be built “in an area of the city that is considered a hub for innovation in the life sciences,” she said.

The grant award was given to Chicago, which topped 58 proposals to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that’s based in Redwood City, California and funded by the couple’s wealth from Facebook shares. The winner was narrowed down to eight contenders and eventually three finalists, the spokesperson said, declining to name the other cities that were in the running.

While several developers have focused on attracting life sciences labs and offices to Chicago, no central ecosystem has emerged in any part of town.

Developers Trammell Crow and Beacon Capital Partners have broken ground on Hyde Park Labs, a 302,400-square-foot life science building at 52nd and Harper avenues on the city’s South Side, a $255 million development close to the University of Chicago.

And last year, injectable drug maker Xeris Pharmaceuticals leased 87,000 square feet in Trammell Crow’s new lab and office building at 1375 West Fulton Street in an exit from the tenant’s Loop offices on LaSalle Street.

Plus, a group of developers known as GRIT that includes Farpoint Development, McLaurin Development Partners, Loop Capital Management and others will soon break ground on a now-$7 billion mixed-use project called Bronzeville Lakefront south of the Loop, with a focus on the life sciences. 

The 7.8 million-square-foot project on the former Michael Reese Hospital site will include a 500,000-square-foot innovation center anchored by Chicago ARC, a life science accelerator to be developed by Israel’s Sheba Medical Center and Kaleidoscope Health Ventures.

— Dana Bartholomew

This story was updated to add Farpoint’s partners on the Bronzeville Lakefront project.