Disease surveillance network faced ‘existential cliff’ despite proven success. Then came the $100 million.
It began with some intriguing scientific discoveries.
A team of researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard began to suspect nearly two decades ago that so-called “emerging diseases” such as Ebola and Lassa virus were not quite what they seemed. Rather than being newly evolved contagions, mounting evidence suggested they were ancient pathogens that had circulated among humans for thousands of years. What really was emerging was accurate diagnosis: Medicine only recently had acquired the ability to detect these diseases and track the toll of outbreaks.
Those revelations planted the seed for Sentinel, a disease surveillance network. Last month, the MacArthur Foundation announced a $100 million award to Sentinel — funding that arrived just as the organization faced the possibility of closure after severe cuts in federal support.
“Work in pandemic preparedness and global health is having an existential crisis right now with the drop in federal funding,” said Sentinel co-founder Pardis Sabeti, professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “We were really on a precarious ledge. So this has completely changed everything.”