About Arc Institute

Our mission is to accelerate scientific progress and understand the root causes of complex diseases. This challenge requires researchers across many disciplines to study fundamental biological mechanisms, develop new technologies, and innovate on therapeutic concepts. By doing this, we aim to improve human health by narrowing the gap between discoveries and impact on patients.

Arc researcher salaries are fully paid by Arc. In addition, the labs of Core Investigators are directly supported by Arc. This means that labs do not need to apply for any outside funding to support their research programs.

Arc is influenced and inspired by the success of many existing institutional experiments, including HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, the Broad Institute, the Salk Institute, CZ Biohub, the Crick Institute, the Max Planck Society, and many others. The basic thesis behind Arc is that there are a couple of ingredients that haven’t been combined before:

• Full, “hard money” support for investigators, so that they can pursue curiosity-driven research programs in unfettered fashion.
• Close partnership with a number of major research universities, including top graduate programs.
• First-class investment in technology development to support research programs, especially genome engineering and software engineering.
• Long-term career paths both for researchers focused on technology development and for Core Investigators.
• Physical colocation of researchers.

We hope that Arc contributes usefully to our understanding of the space of effective configurations for organizing scientific research.

Arc’s donors are contributing more than $650M to the Institute to allow it to fully sustain scientists and their research for renewable eight-year terms.

Silvana Konermann is a cofounder of Arc, a Core Investigator, and serves as the Institute’s Executive Director.

Patrick Hsu is a cofounder of Arc and a Core Investigator. He leads the development of certain Technology Centers and the Translation Program.

Patrick Collison is a cofounder of Arc and a founding donor. He has no operating role at the Institute.

By working together with world-class research universities, Arc enables new opportunities for research and training to tackle the unique challenges that face biomedical innovation today.

The partnership model is several-fold:

• Arc Core Investigators, located at the Arc Institute, can hold tenure-line or adjunct faculty appointments at one of our three partner universities (but are not required to). Appointments at partner universities are decided by the individual university departments. As a central element of Arc, Core faculty serve as a key bridge between the institutions.
• Arc Affiliated faculty maintain their labs at one of our three partner universities and receive unrestricted funding to pursue research of their choice, optionally in collaboration with Arc Institute core labs or technology centers. They expand the intellectual connection between the four institutions.
• Graduate students at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCSF have the opportunity to rotate in and conduct their thesis research in Arc labs.

The Institute‘s growth through 2025 is gradual, with the goal of building a culture and organization that scales. Phase 1 of the institute involves hiring 10–15 Core Investigators, each of whom may employ 10–20 trainees, researchers, or engineers. Our 5 Technology Centers will ultimately be of similar size, for a total headcount of approximately 150–350 scientific personnel.