Bat Health Foundation (BHF)

Providing the scientific community with the data and resources necessary to champion the health of humans, bats, and our shared ecosystem.

Ashley Malmlov, DVM, PhD, Bat Health Foundation Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer

Anna Fagre, DVM, PhD, MPH, Bat Health Foundation Co-Founder, Chief Operating Officer

While bats have been villainized and targeted in recent decades as hosts and vectors for viruses such as SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), bats are keystone species critical to ecosystems, and provide vital services including pollination and pest control for human food crops. Bats and people have an interdependent relationship that science is attempting to better understand; however, these efforts lack cohesion. With the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and its correlation to bats, research will only increase. However, the lack of unified data and siloed approaches create significant gaps in knowledge, leaving bats, humans, and ecosystems at risk. Scientists must unify in order to mitigate spillover risk and advocate for bat conservation.

Evidence is increasing to indicate human encroachment sets the stage for spillover by impacting bat ecology and health. However, it is not understood exactly how these processes affect bat health because monitoring efforts are underfunded and under-prioritized. This is a significant issue because normal ‘healthy’ parameters must be established prior to identifying diseased populations. As it pertains to bats, scientists are attempting to understand complex physiology of disease and mechanisms by which bats serve as reservoir hosts without possessing a true understanding of what a normal healthy bat looks like.

We are using science and veterinary medicine to protect bats and the general public on a global scale by providing foundational data that all bat and public health science benefits from. For all sciences, science communication is the foundation by which progress is made. Through communicating with our scientific network--directly and via conferences and peer-reviewed literature, as well generating conclusions from analyzing Batabase data--BHF will identify needs not yet met and meet demand accordingly. 

Our customers are scientists and animal health experts, but ecosystems and human populations around the world ultimately benefit, and engaging the general public is a pillar of BHF. Since the pandemic began, we have witnessed an increased public investment in the sciences. Science words that have been jargon since their coinage are now regularly used by the general public (e.g. PCR, antibodies, viral evolution, reservoir). As such, it is important to connect with the general public, make ourselves approachable, and increase science transparency. Global connection and teaching opportunities become easier and faster through social media platforms, and these are perfect tools to facilitate communication, listen, answer questions, and shed light on all the amazing science that is carried out every day around the world.

Our solution’s public good lies in the transparent and collaborative data-driven approach for reducing pathogen transmission between bats and humans. In sharing our database with the general public and scientific community at large while also accepting data submissions from stakeholders, we are offering an unprecedented service and public good that will result in the safeguard of human health, wildlife health, and ecosystem health. We are committed to equity in the sciences, and we are carefully crafting a team to guide us in these efforts, ensuring not only representation of minoritized groups in STEM on our BHF team, but enforcing cultural sensitivity trainings for individuals who collaborate with our colleagues abroad. We will employ the wisdom of local in-country scientists as well as anthropologists and sociologists to ensure surveys we conduct are appropriate and respectful of the relationships each community of interest has with bats. Celebration and acknowledgement of in-country collaborators is also paramount to our success, and we will outline on our website the process for data submission in a way that ensures credit is given to data submitters. Further, our internship programs will recruit minoritized groups in STEM while also training the next generation of wildlife health professionals.

Tangible impact will be assessed in a number of ways. We aim to revolutionize the way the scientific community approaches understanding the health of free-ranging animal populations, using a bat health database as our principal product. Promoting dialogue and data acquisition around understanding bat health will allow us not only to detect subtle changes in colony health and the rapid identification of sick or compromised bat populations, but will ultimately result in safeguarding human populations through minimizing disease transmission. 

Our impact within the scientific community will be quantified through tracking of pre-prints and peer-reviewed publications resulting from our collaborative efforts or the use of our database. We feel strongly that researchers who contribute research efforts and data should be attributed for sharing their data, and as such, will explore the use of digital object identifiers or other techniques for researchers to cite themselves and each other. In addition to incentivizing data sharing, ensuring proper attribution advances equity in the sciences and is particularly helpful for early-career researchers. In addition to publications, we anticipate that our data will inform infectious disease surveillance efforts as well as policy related to environmental health and public health.

Based on a robust theory of change, BHF will scale its impact by following a framework of activities that will lead to outputs and outcomes over the next 3+years in the following ways: 

1. Through generating a portal that is accessible, progressive, and tractable. Connectivity with this portal will self-propagate thereby expanding our reach. The more that experts from different fields participate, the more we can harness growing technology to advance science to guide public, bat and ecosystem health.

2. As initial proof-of-concept work is completed on our diagnostic pipeline, the services we provide the science community will increase in conjunction with our network and access to advanced diagnostics. As our services and networks expand, we will proportionately hire additional scientists, laboratory technicians, administrative personnel, SQL and UX/UI developers, IT, and more. 

3. We will begin a series of internships and fellowships to mentor the next generation of wildlife health professionals. 

4. When international travel resumes more regularly, we will deploy our team to the field to collect samples from free-ranging bats around the world, coupling parameters obtained from biological samples with spatial analyses derived from individual-animal GPS tracking technologies and land use data.

Based on BHF’s planned program measures and indicators, the organization will track progress made against benchmarks as the organization moves forward in its first year. Firstly, we will monitor the publication of peer-reviewed journal articles, white papers, and pre-prints that arise from data generated in our database, and whether any of these efforts result in policy impacts. Additional measurable indicators include number of bat species characterized, number of new partner organizations and institutions, number of individuals that contribute to or use data from Batabase, and number of participants from each scientific discipline/institution. Initial engagement with new collaborators will be through the use of social and scientific networking platforms (e.g. using built-in account activity analytics on Twitter). As we increase our efforts in public education and citizen science engagement, we will collaborate with social scientists who can assist with the distribution and analysis of Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) surveys to prioritize target areas for more focused public engagement.

Our largest barriers currently are financial ones, which limit hiring of staff, establishment of administration, detailed marketing and fundraising plans, and securing the equipment needed to synthesize and generate data. We have access to numerous archived samples from free-ranging North American, Asian, and African bats as well as access to samples from a captive breeding colony of Jamaican fruit bats to proof our diagnostic repertoire. However, conducting research requires financial capital to fund salaries, procure time, and purchase reagents and disposables. We are currently conducting initial funder research, consulting with nonprofit experts, have applied to be a part of an entrepreneurial program that provides resources for start-up companies (InnosphereVentures.org), and are applying for grants to circumvent these barriers all of which are being done on a volunteer basis by BHF founders. 

Geopolitical and cultural barriers may preclude fieldwork in specific countries, so thoughtful discussions with collaborators working in different countries will be necessary to ensure sample collection will be culturally and legally viable. As previously mentioned, we are exploring data attribution options for individuals who contribute to Batabase in a way that maximizes equity and respect while further incentivizing data sharing.

Verena Consortium and Colorado State University

We have a unique skill set and expertise to create an innovative and sustainable service for the scientific community while advocating for human, bat, and ecosystem health. In addition, we have a diverse and generous network of scientists and nonscientists alike that will allow us to meet the demands necessary to grow BHF. 

The founders identified the critical knowledge gaps within bat science many years ago, and in January 2021 took action to generate solutions, establishing BHF.  Since then, we have made incredible progress in a short time, becoming an official organization, making great strides networking, and laying our infrastructure. We have a four-phase plan for scaling up that has been validated by the overwhelming support from our scientific community. We may be in the startup phase, but we are already demonstrating the vast amount of progress we are capable of. 

The Trinity Challenge will afford us the financial platform we need to launch into action, making BHF an internationally recognized leader in bat health in the next 3 years. Furthermore, our values surrounding collaboration are consistent with what the Trinity Challenge fosters and will allow us to be a part of a tremendous community.

There are many Trinity Challenge Member organisations whose expertise would help advance our solution and result in fruitful, mutually beneficial collaboration, specifically the Global Virome Project (GVP) and Microsoft. As virologists and veterinarians, we have followed the GVP and their contributions to the field of biodiversity genomics and pandemic prevention since 2018. Collaboration with GVP would synergize our virome and microbiome work, and their network and expertise in bioinformatics and surveillance networks would be tremendously beneficial in our efforts to expand Batabase. Through sample sharing, data sharing, and networking, we can leverage the existing efforts of GVP by supplementing bat zoonoses data with information related to the bat health, allowing for integration of predictive modeling to advance our understanding of how and when disruptions to these parameters could result in disease transmission. The other member organisation with which we would like to connect is Microsoft, owing to their AI for Health initiative. As we build Batabase, we aim to generate an interactive map for scientists to monitor and track our progress, and for the public to learn about local bat research, and report sick or dying bats to local public health agencies.