How Tech Billionaires Are Reshaping Biomedical Research and Science Philanthropy

It is boom time for billionaires. In the coming months, new technology entrepreneurs could join the ranks of the super-rich, pushing the global number of billionaires even higher.

Two artificial-intelligence giants, OpenAI and Anthropic, plan to go public within the next year or so. Their anticipated free floats could make some employees extremely wealthy. Some analysts predict that Anthropic’s initial public offering (IPO) could raise a record $2 trillion. OpenAI is reportedly targeting a $1.4 trillion valuation in its IPO, although the company has postponed its listing until 2027 following new concerns about AI safety.

If these IPOs proceed as planned, their effects could extend far beyond sales of superyachts, mansions and private jets. The resulting investment windfall could generate more private investment and philanthropic contributions from technology entrepreneurs interested in biomedical fields such as cancer biology, longevity and reproductive technology.

“These are very exciting times,” says Andrew Lo, an entrepreneurship researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “We’re going to see the creative energy of the technology industry unleashed.”

Wealthy technology entrepreneurs have long invested money and creative energy in medical research. As their fortunes have grown, so too have the size of their investments and the range of ways they distribute their funds.

One prominent example is Altos Labs, a longevity-focused company in Redwood City, California, founded in 2022 with $3 billion in funding from technology investors including Yuri Milner and Jeff Bezos. The amount was unprecedented for an emerging biotechnology company without a new drug candidate. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), founded by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and physician Priscilla Chan, has spent about $4 billion on basic science and other activities and plans to spend up to $10 billion more over the next decade.

Unlike government funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), ultra-wealthy research investors often prioritize high-risk, long-term projects. Many technology entrepreneurs are also keen to invest in emerging technologies and use artificial intelligence in biomedicine.

In April, CZI announced that it would spend $500 million on predictive AI models of human cells. Last year, the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit arm of OpenAI in San Francisco, California, committed $25 billion to health, disease treatment and AI resilience. This year, the foundation announced more than $100 million in donations to Alzheimer’s disease research and an additional $125 million for life-science data projects.

However, these investments come amid public suspicion of the technology elite and its political influence. The success of many philanthropy programmes is difficult to assess, particularly when they promote technologies developed and commercialized by the same people who fund them.

Private investment in longevity research and controversial reproductive technologies, including gene editing of human embryos, has also raised questions about whether technology entrepreneurs are directing science towards applications that benefit wealthy people rather than society as a whole.

“Philanthropy doesn’t get anyone elected,” says Rob Reich, a political scientist at Stanford University in California. “There’s no way to hold them accountable.”

From industrial philanthropy to technology-driven science funding

American philanthropists have a long history of influencing the content and methods of scientific research. In the early twentieth century, grants from industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller helped transform higher education and strengthen the role of US universities in scientific research. Their giving focused on supporting the institutions they funded.

Today’s philanthropists are more likely to seek specific outcomes than to support the long-term health of universities, says Eric John Abrahamson, a historian at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

According to the Science Philanthropy Alliance, nonprofit organizations, including philanthropic groups, supported an estimated $25 billion in research and development in 2024. That represented approximately 11% of total research funding in the United States.

How billionaire philanthropy is funding biomedical innovation

Although it is difficult to track every donation from technology industry leaders, individual examples demonstrate their influence. In 2000, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates established the Gates Foundation, formerly known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to invest heavily in vaccine development, infectious-disease research and other areas. Last year, Gates announced that he would donate about $200 billion over the next 20 years.

Other major technology donors include Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who has donated more than $1 billion to Parkinson’s disease research. Sean Parker, an early Facebook executive, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to cancer immunotherapy research.

In 2021, several philanthropists, including technology entrepreneurs, donated $650 million to establish the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The institute aims to understand the root causes of complex diseases. US software magnate Larry Ellison has also announced that he will spend billions of pounds over 10 years on a new campus near the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The campus will focus on healthcare, agriculture, climate change and AI.

Technology entrepreneurs have also supported biomedical innovation through private-sector investments. Calico Life Sciences, founded in 2013 with support from Google, was designed as a long-term “moonshot” programme focused on combating ageing and treating disease. Sam Altman, co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, has invested approximately $180 million in Retro Biosciences, a longevity-focused company based in Redwood City, California.

In some cases, the boundary between commercial investing and philanthropy is becoming increasingly blurred, says Louis Shechtman, a network scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.

CZI, for example, was established as a limited liability company (LLC) rather than a tax-exempt foundation. Depending on how an LLC is structured, it might not qualify for the tax benefits available to traditional charities. However, LLCs offer greater flexibility in how money is spent and fewer requirements to publicly disclose activities, says Joan Heminway, a business law scholar at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

In a 2015 statement shortly after CZI’s launch, Zuckerberg said that the LLC structure “gives flexibility to organizations that do their best work, regardless of their structure”. He also said that net proceeds from investments in CZI would be used to advance philanthropic causes.

The United States’ favourable tax system and high concentration of billionaires, many of them from the technology industry, make it unrivalled among wealthy countries in philanthropy, Shechtman says. The country is also a major centre for biomedical research and is home to nearly half of the world’s biopharmaceutical companies.

Why private science funding can take greater risks

US technology entrepreneurs tend to experiment with how they structure their investments, says Keith Yamamoto, vice provost for science policy and strategy at the University of California, San Francisco.

Private donors can take more risks than government funding agencies, which rely on taxpayers to ensure that money is spent responsibly. “Public funding limits activity,” says Harold Varmus, a former director of the NIH and an advisory board member for the Gates Foundation and CZI. “There is freedom of action related to private money.”

Some technology philanthropists have also experimented with alternative grant-making models. The Arc Institute, for example, promotes an “unconditional” funding system designed to give researchers more freedom than standard government grants for biomedical research.

Private philanthropists can fund long-term, interdisciplinary projects that are difficult to support through government grants. Convergent Research, a nonprofit organization funded in part by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, is creating “focused research organizations” that bring teams together to solve important scientific or engineering problems.

“We’re looking for critical, fundamental pieces of infrastructure that are missing in certain areas,” says Anastasia Gamik, co-founder and president of Convergent Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Projects include developing inexpensive methods to map neurons in the mammalian brain and conducting large-scale screens to catalogue off-target effects of small-molecule drugs.

Yamamoto also cited CZI’s Advanced Biological Imaging Laboratory as an example of a long-term, high-risk project. The initiative brings together engineers, physicists, computer scientists and biologists to refine cryo-electron tomography, a technique that could allow researchers to image processes inside cells at the level of individual proteins.

Open science, longevity research and controversial investments

The willingness to accept risk is also evident in technology entrepreneurs’ investments in for-profit companies. Some investors want to reshape the way basic research is conducted.

Arcadia Science, based in Emeryville, California, was founded with support from Altman and US cryptocurrency entrepreneur Jed McCaleb. The company promises to “reimagine the entire research cycle” by moving beyond common laboratory model organisms such as mice and bacteria and studying more diverse organisms, including Escherichia coli. Like Calico Life Sciences, Arcadia warned investors from the outset that its work would take time.

Arcadia has also adopted an unusual approach for a commercial company by embracing open science. Its laboratory protocols, computer code and datasets are published online, says Yamamoto.

Silicon Valley investors are also willing to enter controversial areas of research. Last year, Brian Armstrong, chief executive of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, helped fund Preventive, a company developing a method to edit the genomes of human fetuses to prevent disease.

The San Francisco-based company must first establish the basic science of heritable gene editing and determine whether the technique can be performed safely, says Preventive co-founder Lucas Harrington. Private investment will allow the company to conduct its research, whereas US legal regulations prohibit government grant funding for this work.

As technology billionaires direct more money towards biomedical research, their philanthropy could accelerate high-risk science, support open research and create new approaches to funding innovation. At the same time, the growing influence of private wealth raises questions about accountability, transparency and whose interests future biomedical advances will serve.