SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, on Wednesday pledged more than US$3 billion toward a plan to "cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children's lifetime."

Investments will include a bioscience research center, called the Biohub, and plans for a chip to diagnose diseases, continuous bloodstream monitoring and a map of cell types in the body.

Chan and Zuckerberg will donate US$600 million over the next decade to the Biohub research center, which will bring together San Francisco Bay-area researchers and scientists from the University of California San Francisco, the University of California Berkeley and Stanford University.

Two initial projects of the research center will be a Cell Atlas, a map of cells controlling the body's major organs, and the Infectious Disease Initiative, which develops new tools, tests, vaccines and strategies for fighting diseases such as HIV, Ebola and Zika.