A new philanthropic effort — backed by money from some of the biggest names in AI — is taking aim at eliminating respiratory viruses, starting with the common cold and influenza.
Intercept is starting with $500 million in seed funding from Anthropic, OpenAI Foundation, and the payment company Stripe, along with venture capitalists at Jane Street, and from Bill Gates, through a philanthropic entity.
The organization is going after cold and flu viruses first, citing the huge economic and health burden these common infections cause each year. And anything that targets these viruses is likely to “meaningfully reduce pandemic risk,” according to an online post by the fund that explains its mission.
“We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case,” wrote Nan Ransohoff, co-head of Intercept, and head of Public Goods at Stripe, on a web forum. “Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics,” she wrote.
Intercept said it will focus its efforts on two platforms: broad-spectrum preventatives and air-cleaning technologies.
The broad-spectrum products would protect against rhinoviruses, influenza, coronaviruses, and other respiratory viruses simultaneously. The philanthropy said it wants to help develop products that would prevent “more than 75% of symptomatic respiratory infections in as few doses as possible, via easy-to-administer modalities, and that have a credible path to ~60% uptake.
The fund’s goal is to advance two or more products to phase 2 studies, after which it hopes a pharmaceutical company would continue the development.
For air cleaning, Intercept aims to promote technologies that can reduce aerosols by > 75%, and that can be easily adopted at a low cost. Intercept said that many of these technologies — including air filtration, antimicrobial light, and antimicrobial vapors — already exist, but demand has been limited. The fund said it would work with regulators, corporations, and others to ensure that the technologies become more attractive.
Intercept has a roster of advisers who are well-known in the infectious disease and engineering fields and had experience during the COVID pandemic, including Moncef Slaoui, PhD, who led Operation Warp Speed; former FDA official Peter Marks, PhD; Virginia Tech’s Linsey Marr, who has studied the airborne viruses; biochemist David Veesler, whose work helped pioneer the COVID vaccines; and Luciana Borio, who worked in counterterrorism and emerging threats at the FDA, and was director for medical and biodefense preparedness policy at the White House National Security Council.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.