Interventions against pathogens
Reducing risks through broad-spectrum vaccines and therapeutics
This profile is tailored towards students studying biological sciences, engineering and law, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
Pandemic outbreaks can cause enormous loss of life. Global excess mortality due to COVID-19 was at least 17 million in 2020 and 2021, with more deaths continuing to this day, and pandemics can be far more deadly: the 1918 influenza pandemic, for example, killed between 1% and 5.4% of the global population. Smaller influenza pandemics, such as those in 1957 and 1968 which killed 1-4 million people worldwide, demonstrate that the emergence of new respiratory viruses is a routine event. Pandemics harm the quality of people’s lives in other ways; for example, the COVID-19 global recession is the deepest since the end of WWII according to the Brookings Institute. The Institute for Progress has estimated that COVID-19 cost the USA between 7 and 16 trillion dollars worth of health and economic damage, over and above the value of lives lost.
The next pandemic could be much deadlier and cause irrecoverable damage to global civilisation and humanity’s potential for flourishing in the future. A more deadly pandemic could emerge naturally, but as the necessary level of expertise and cost of creating dangerous novel pathogens continually decreases, anthropogenic pandemics are also becoming an increasing concern. There are multiple routes via which this could occur; there are many historical examples of dangerous viruses being accidentally released from research labs, or an anthropogenic pandemic could be started by the intentional release of pathogens, for example by a terrorist group or military during warfare.
To address future pandemics, we need medical interventions against pathogens to be faster to produce, effective against a broad range of threats, and cheaper and easier to produce at scale. The development of therapeutics and vaccines typically takes many years, and prophylactics and treatments typically address only individual pathogens. Making medical interventions that are effective against a broad range of pathogens and can be quickly adapted to novel threats would drastically increase our resilience to natural and engineered pandemics.
Improving the speed with which prophylactics and therapeutics can be manufactured and distributed is also important. Medical interventions can be difficult to transport, store or administer – for example, the need for cold chains to transport COVID vaccines made vaccination efforts more challenging, particularly in low-income countries. Increasing the scalability of relevant biotechnologies via lowering costs and overcoming technical barriers is also needed.
Medical countermeasures can have downside risks (for example, some vaccine platforms can increase how easy it is to synthesise dangerous viruses). If you’re interested in this area, apply for our coaching and we can connect you with experts in this area who can offer you advice on navigating these risks.
To learn more about an example of work in this area, see this talk from Alvea, an organisation formed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to develop a scalable, shelf-stable vaccine that is easy to adapt to new COVID-19 variants and pathogens.
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Contributors: This profile was last updated 8/1/2023. Thanks to Elika Somani and Oliver Crook for helpful feedback on this profile. All errors remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
