Ubiquitous Viral Discovery and Surveillance

Near real-time viral discovery and surveillance performed at the local level.

Andrew McDowell

The world is becoming increasingly vulnerable to outbreaks of novel viruses like SARS-CoV-2.  Scientists estimate that there are up to 827,000 unknown human infectious viral species waiting to be discovered.  Current viral discovery methods are conducted by hand and are prohibitively expensive to scale due to fieldwork logistics and cold chain management of the samples.  The estimated cost to discover about 80 percent of unknown human infectious viruses is $7.5 billion.

We are working to improve the lives of all humans everywhere by making pandemics a thing of the past.  As the current coronavirus crisis has shown us, everyone is affected, however marginalized populations facing an even greater risk.  We will equip researchers at government, academic, and private research institutions to give them increased capacity for conducting viral discovery and surveillance.  As technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, we will ensure that even small municipalities will have robust viral discovery and surveillance programs.  In a short time, we want viral discovery and surveillance to be as common as any other municipal service like drinking water, solid waste management, and other services that benefit public health.

All designs, methodologies, and technical documentation created through the pursuit of our solution (regardless if selected by Trinity Challenge) will be made available in the public domain. We are 100 percent focused on improving lives and livelihoods everywhere and not concerned with any personal benefits.

The initial target population includes people who are suffering from food or water insecurity, wealth inequality, and live in a dense urban environment.  We think that these three factors will likely identify people living at close proximity to the human-animal (i.e., tranmission) interface and at greatest risk from a viral pandemic.  However, this solution is highly scalable and we believe that ubiquitous viral discovery and surveillance will be as common as other municipal-level public health services (e.g., wastewater treatment, solid waste management, etc.).

Within one year we hope to develop a relationship or cooperative research and development agreement with at least one US-based academic lab.  After that, because everything we do will be publicly available, we hope to scale organically from there. Within three years we hope to support at least one academic lab in each US State, and one lab in each of the following categories; international, commercial, and state/local.  

The benchmark for viral discovery and surveillance was set through the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) PREDICT program.  The PREDICT program cost $200 million from 2009 to 2020 and resulted in approximately 100,000 wild animals sampled with 1,200 novel viruses discovered. Simplified, this is about $20 million per year to sample 10,000 wild animals and discover 120 novel viruses.  When scaled, we think that our solution can provide similar results for $2 million per year.

The largest barrier is the increasing amount of regulation regarding drone operations.  In the US, there are federal (nationwide), state, and in some cases local restrictions.  Untangling these regulations will be paramount to successfully scaling our solution.

Epicore.org

We believe that the Trinity Challenge can provide the access to funding and expertise that will help us realize our vision for a pandemic-free future enabled by ubiquitous viral discovery and surveillance.

We would like to partner with the Global Virome Project because Dennis Carroll and Peter Daszak have greatly shaped our thinking about the problem.  Additionally, we would like to partner with Palantir as the platform to host and visualize any viral data.