https://blog.interceptfund.com/p/ending-respiratory-infections
"A century ago, waterborne diseases levied similar costs to those posed by
respiratory viruses like colds and influenza today: endemic, periodically
epidemic, and widely accepted as an inevitable feature of human life. Then, at
the turn of the twentieth century, we decided they didn’t have to be.
Pharmaceutical advances and clean water infrastructure made cholera, typhoid,
and dysentery rare across much of the world within a matter of decades.
Why haven’t we already seen the same kind of transformation with respiratory
viruses? Last August we hosted a symposium at Stripe with ~40 leading
scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech venture capitalists, and regulatory
experts to better understand if this is technically possible and, if so, why it
hasn’t happened yet.
We heard two main reasons. First, it’s just technically very challenging:
respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across
several families. Fortunately, new platform technologies, advances in our
understanding of human immunology, biological data sets, and protein design
tools mean we have our strongest ever suite of approaches for tackling it.
Second, the development of the broad-spectrum solutions needed to solve the
first problem has historically been underfunded, neither a great fit for
philanthropic nor commercial funding. While COVID generated a burst of activity
around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of
new funding, that hasn’t been sustained.
We believe that with enough focus and funding, these problems are tractable.
Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage
of these new tools to catalyze the development of two types of products:
broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies. Together, these
technologies can radically reduce the burden of respiratory infections, and can
eventually help eliminate them altogether."
Via Ada Palmer and Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
