The Unbreakable Initiative
Every superpower has an origin story. Help write the first real one.
We're using gene editing, lab-grown bone and AI to discover how human cells can build bone stronger than healthy — the closest real science has come to a superpower. This is the beginning. You can be in it.
The Question
Superheroes survive falls that would shatter bones. They run farther, recover faster, and shrug off forces that would break the rest of us. Those abilities belong to fiction. But they raise a real question science has never been able to answer:
The Unbreakable Initiative was created to find out.
The Science of Stronger Bone
Bone is one of the most remarkable materials in nature. Pound for pound, it's as strong as stainless steel — but unlike steel, it grows, adapts to exercise, and heals itself. It's built from tiny mineral crystals held together by a network of more than 112 different proteins. Those proteins decide how well bone can resist breaking. Yet after decades of research, no one knows which combination makes it strongest.
Until recently, that question was practically impossible to answer. Three technologies just changed that:
Gene Editing at Scale
Automated systems let us edit human donor cells and create dozens of variations at once, adjusting one bone protein at a time.
Lab-Grown Bone
We coax cells in the lab to grow spheres of bone the size of a grain of sand, then measure their real strength using technology borrowed from the microprocessor industry.
AI
We feed all that data into an AI model that predicts the strongest possible bone human cells could make. A large language model, but for building better bone.
Together, these let us do in a few years what would once have taken a decade or more.
Why We're Asking You
Government science agencies fund research that makes people healthy — diagnosing and treating illness and injury. We believe that work matters, and that it will lead to real treatments one day. But they don't fund making tissue better than healthy. So instead of asking those agencies, we're asking the people who never stopped believing in superpowers.
Fund the Discovery phase, and you make the proof of concept possible — the evidence that unlocks everything after it.
This campaign funds Phase I: Discovery — the very beginning of the story. Every gift is a page of Issue #1 of the Unbreakable Initiative.
Comic Book Fan
$25
Our primary supporters. Be part of the Origin Story
Hero
$26 – $500
Origin Wall + exclusive updates
Guardian
$501 – $1000
All above + behind-the-scenes access
Architect
more an $1,000
All above + name in published research acknowledgments
The Team
Lead Researcher
Research is led by Dr. Christopher J. Hernandez at UC San Francisco — Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences, and a faculty member in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He has studied the mechanical performance of bones and joints for over 32 years. His team brings together experts in gene editing, bone cell biology and materials science across UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs.
Learn More About Us →Making bones better than healthy takes three phases. This campaign kickstarts the first.
Phase I — Discovery
Now
Edit human cells to study each bone protein, grow and strength-test lab bone, and train an AI to design the strongest possible bone matrix.
Phase II
Next
Find the protein recipes that work in a living organism. We then confirm the best recipes in mice — yes, a mouse with "unbreakable" bones.
Phase III
Future
Identify pharmaceuticals that could strengthen bone in people. (No — we are not proposing to genetically engineer humans.)
Total effort: roughly $10 million over 3–5 years. This crowdfunding campaign launches Phase I and proves the concept that justifies everything after.
No. We genetically edit cells collected from adult human donors, under ethical and safety review by our institutions. The long-term goal is a medicine people could take to improve their bones — not editing humans.
Not literally — no real material is truly unbreakable; anything breaks eventually. We're not coating bones in metal like in the comics. Metal can be stronger, but it can't heal or grow the way living bone can. Our goal is bone that's meaningfully stronger and tougher than healthy.
Not you, and not yet. This work is on cells in the lab and, later, animals under ethical review. After Discovery, we hope to develop medicines that could strengthen bone in people.
That's what existing osteoporosis treatments do. We're focused on the bone material itself — improving the matrix can strengthen whole bone more effectively, in younger and older people alike.
Federal bone-science funding is aimed at treating illness and injury — making people healthy. Agencies don't fund making tissue better than healthy. Your support provides the proof of concept we'll use to unlock future funding.
With financial oversight by UC San Francisco, which sets allowable costs and researcher salaries. Gifts fund experiments (materials, cell nutrients, gene sequencing), the salaries of the researchers doing the work, and sharing the discoveries. UCSF may sub-award collaborators to help the project succeed.