Cofounded by Patrick Collison, Patrick Hsu, and Silvana Konermann, Arc Institute is an attempt to fix the incentives of biomedical science: salaried, multi-year funding for hand-picked investigators so they can chase complex diseases — cancer, neurodegeneration, immune dysfunction — without grant-cycle pressure. Beyond the wet lab it builds for the whole field, most strikingly Proto — an open-source framework from Brian Hie’s lab that compiles high-level design goals into a single optimization across DNA, RNA, proteins, and ligands, collapsing thousands of candidate experiments down to tens. A serious bet that generative biology should be shared infrastructure, not a silo.
