Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, have given $150 million to a research institute to establish a "new era of biology" aimed at battling diseases with a mix of data and life science studies.
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The Massachusetts-based Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard will use the funds to build a new center that will bring together academia and industry to merge the two disciplines in an effort to make people healthier.
"Until now, these fields have largely developed in parallel," the Broad Institute said in a statement on Thursday. "Their convergence will create a new era of biology, one that is expected to yield a deep understanding of biological processes, with the ultimate aim of improving human health through more powerful disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment."
Experts say the initiative sets a precedent for building more research centers that mix the two disciplines.
