DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals to develop an end-to-end platform capability for preventing a pandemic threat in <60 days.

Recent advances in medical countermeasures have formed a strong foundation, enabling the creation of a true end-to-end pandemic prevention platform.

credit: FastCoExist

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However, experience gained from conventional responses to emerging infectious diseases (MERS, SARS, dengue, chikungunya, Ebola) has demonstrated that significant bottlenecks hinder the rapid response to an emerging infectious threat .

Current challenges include the ability to rapidly produce virus needed to test and evaluate therapies, to obtain high potency antibodies within the first weeks of an outbreak, or to scale delivery methods into humans to produce protective levels inside the patient.