# Arc Institute **Draft profile.** Palo Alto–based nonprofit biomedical research institute founded in **December 2021** with **$650M** in initial funding. Co-founded by **Silvana Konermann** (Stanford biochemistry, inaugural executive director), **Patrick Hsu** (UC Berkeley bioengineering), and **[[Patrick Collison]]** (Stripe CEO). Operates in formal partnership with **Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCSF**. The **permanent institutional successor to [[Fast Grants]]** — a deliberate experiment in what biomedical research looks like when funded on **8-year unrestricted grants** rather than 3-year NIH project-based grants. ## Origin Story Arc emerged directly out of **[[Fast Grants]]**: 1. **April 2020** — Cowen, Collison, and Patrick Hsu launch Fast Grants as a pandemic-emergency funding experiment. 2. **2020–2021** — The collaboration goes well. Hsu introduces Collison to Silvana Konermann (Stanford biochemistry professor, former Feng Zhang collaborator on CRISPR-Cas13 work). 3. **December 2021** — Arc Institute publicly launches with $650M committed funding, Stanford/Berkeley/UCSF partnerships in place, and Konermann installed as inaugural executive director. The genealogy matters because Arc is the **only major U.S. biomedical research institution founded explicitly as an output of the Progress Studies / metascience movement**. It is the proof that the movement can translate from manifesto → grant program → permanent research institution. ## The Funding Model Arc's institutional innovation is the **8-year unrestricted grant** model: - **Core Investigators** (faculty) receive 8 years of full lab funding — salary, postdocs, materials, equipment — with no grant-writing requirement during the term. - Faculty retain their joint appointments at Stanford / Berkeley / UCSF. - Internal **Technology Centers** (genome engineering, multiomics, AI/ML) provide shared infrastructure. - No project-by-project peer review during the 8-year window. Investigators choose their own questions. - Evaluation is **at the end of the term**, on overall trajectory and impact, not on specific grant outcomes. This is a deliberate inversion of the **NIH R01 grant model** — which requires constant grant-writing, narrow scoping, and risk-aversion to maintain funding continuity. The thesis: *fund people, not projects; give them long horizons; evaluate impact at the end.* It is also a deliberate echo of the **Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator program** model — and Arc is openly framed as "HHMI for the Progress Studies era." ## Research Areas Arc has self-organized around four broad areas: 1. **Genome engineering** — CRISPR systems, novel editors, large-scale delivery 2. **AI for biology** — Foundation models for cells (Evo, etc.), virtual cell modeling, AI/ML drug discovery 3. **Disease biology** — Neurodegeneration, immunology, cancer 4. **Computational and synthetic biology** — Multiomics, single-cell sequencing infrastructure **Notable output (2024–2025):** Arc released **Evo**, a DNA foundation model trained on prokaryotic genomes — one of the first credible "GPT for DNA" releases — and follow-up **Evo 2** in 2025. Arc has positioned itself as one of the most visible **AI-for-biology** research nonprofits, competing in profile if not in headcount with DeepMind's Isomorphic Labs and [[Sam Altman]]'s Retro Biosciences. ## Funding The $650M launch was anonymous in significant part, with **[[Patrick Collison]]** confirmed as a major donor and named co-founder. Reporting suggested the donor base was drawn from the same Silicon Valley capital network that funded **[[Fast Grants]]** — Stripe-orbit, [[Y Combinator]]-orbit, and adjacent. Arc has not relied on NIH grants for core funding, by design. Faculty may still pursue NIH grants for specific projects, but the institute's existence is **not contingent on the federal funding apparatus** — a deliberate political statement embedded in the funding structure. ## Why It Matters in This KB ### 1. It is the most institutionally mature output of Progress Studies Of every [[Progress Studies]]-adjacent institution documented in this KB, **Arc has the largest budget, the most prestigious academic partnerships, and the most credentialed scientific staff.** [[Roots of Progress]] is a fellowship-and-conference operation; [[Institute for Progress]] is a policy shop; [[Fast Grants]] was a one-off emergency program. Arc is a **permanent research institution at Stanford-adjacent scale** — and it exists *because* of the movement. ### 2. It is the AI-for-biology frontier from the Progress Studies side While [[OpenAI]] / [[Anthropic]] / [[Google DeepMind]] dominate general AI, Arc has become one of the most-watched **biology-specific AI research nonprofits**. The Evo foundation models put Arc in the conversation alongside Isomorphic Labs, Inflection-era Suleyman bets, and Retro Biosciences. This is the **biological frontier of the broader TESCREAL-adjacent AI investment thesis** — same operators, biology-specific. ### 3. It is a direct counter-model to NIH-style funding Arc's 8-year unrestricted grant model is an **explicit ideological statement**: the federal biomedical funding apparatus is too slow, too risk-averse, too captured by short-horizon thinking. Private capital can do it better. That argument — politically inert when framed as scientific methodology — is the same argument [[Institute for Progress]] makes about R&D bureaucracy and that the broader [[Progress Studies]] movement makes about institutional design. ### 4. It is a critical capital-flow data point Arc represents the **single largest institutional commitment of TESCREAL-adjacent Silicon Valley capital to permanent biomedical infrastructure** — bigger by an order of magnitude than [[Open Philanthropy]]'s biosecurity portfolio and comparable to mid-size pharma R&D budgets. That is significant for the broader story of how the tech-philanthropic capital described elsewhere in the KB is reshaping U.S. research infrastructure outside the federal system. ## Critiques - **Founder concentration of governance.** Patrick Hsu and Silvana Konermann run their own Arc labs while sitting on Arc's leadership. The structure works on trust; critics flag the lack of separation between funding decisions and faculty positions. - **Bay Area / elite-university selection effects.** All three academic partners are northern California R1 institutions. Arc's faculty pipeline is drawn from the same handful of elite labs Konermann and Hsu came from. - **"Better than NIH" politics.** The institute's existence is implicitly an argument that private mega-funders allocate biomedical capital better than peer-reviewed federal mechanisms. That argument is contestable on the merits and has clear ideological weight regardless of merit. - **TESCREAL capital legitimation.** Arc lends scientific prestige to the broader [[Progress Studies]] capital network — a network whose other projects (e.g., [[California Forever]], [[Erebor]], [[Anduril]]-adjacent ventures) have less unambiguously benign profiles. ## Draft Notes / To Expand - Confirm full donor list (much of it remains anonymous) - Document the Evo / Evo 2 model architecture and reception in the bio-ML community - Add Patrick Hsu [[Patrick Hsu]] and Silvana Konermann [[Silvana Konermann]] - Trace Arc Core Investigator roster and KB-relevant individuals - Map the relationship to Howard Hughes Medical Institute (acknowledged template) - Document Arc's commercial spinout policy (IP, equity in faculty companies) - Trace any defense-tech or dual-use bio-AI applications - Compare to Retro Biosciences (Altman) and Isomorphic Labs (DeepMind) as adjacent privately-funded bio-research entities ## See Also - [[Patrick Collison]] — Co-founder, primary patron - [[Patrick Hsu]] — Scientific co-founder (UC Berkeley) - [[Silvana Konermann]] — Scientific co-founder, executive director (Stanford) - [[Fast Grants]] — Direct institutional predecessor - [[Progress Studies]] — Parent movement - [[Roots of Progress]] — Sister institution - [[Institute for Progress]] — Sister institution on policy side - [[Mercatus Center]] — Adjacent institutional home of Fast Grants - [[Stripe]] — Patrick Collison's day job; donor network source - [[TESCREAL]] — Adjacent ideological bundle - [[Open Philanthropy]] — Adjacent EA-funded biomedical research backer