Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have announced they're building a computing system to eradicate human disease by 2100

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have announced they're building a computing system to eradicate human disease by 2100.

In a statement, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) - Zuckerberg and Chan's foundation -  announced that they aim to develop a computing system that researchers can use with artificial intelligence (AI) to catalogue cells and predict how they act when diseased. The data could be used to make groundbreaking new discoveries that could help cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century, the foundation said.

"AI is creating new opportunities in biomedicine, and building a high-performance computing cluster dedicated to life science research will accelerate progress on important scientific questions about how our cells work," said CZI Co-founder and Co-CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"Developing digital models capable of predicting all cell types and cell states from the genome will help researchers better understand our cells and how they behave in health and disease," he added.

"AI models could predict how an immune cell responds to an infection, what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or even how a patient's body will respond to a new medication," Priscilla Chan said.

"We hope that this collaborative effort will generate new insights about the fundamental characteristics of our cells," she added.