A New Era of Inflammation Research

Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago Opens Its Labs

March 15, 2024

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago, a new biomedical research lab uniting investigators across top universities to study inflammation and the immune system, officially began operating out of its new space in Fulton Market in January.

The hub will be funded with $250 million over a decade from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), with an additional $25 million committed by the State of Illinois. It is part of a national network of sites established by CZI, the philanthropic foundation set up by Facebook (now Meta) founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. CZI announced its plans for the Chicago hub in March 2023.

At the helm of CZ Biohub Chicago’s efforts is Shana Kelley, PhD. Dr. Kelley is the Neena B. Schwartz Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at Feinberg and of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering.

The hub unites scientists from Illinois’s top research institutions—the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Northwestern University. It includes state-of-the-art laboratories, meeting spaces, faculty-in-residence, a biofoundry, and other sophisticated instrumentation. The goal is to enable cross-collaboration and innovation among the region’s best investigators to better understand inflammation within the body, leading to new treatments and prevention strategies for inflammatory conditions and diseases.

“The scientific challenge we’re exploring—to develop new tools to better measure tissues and gain insights into inflammation—has large engineering challenges to surmount, and is wildly, but not impossibly, ambitious—and can only be solved by interdisciplinary collaboration,” Dr. Kelley told Northwestern Medicine Magazine in September 2023.