MIT Technology Review is reporting that payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, is funding a new $500 million nonprofit called Intercept. The organization's goal is to prevent common colds and the flu, with an eventual aim to eradicate all respiratory viruses.
Intercept plans to use grants and investments to support prevention strategies, including vaccines and large-scale air-cleaning systems for public spaces like schools and offices. Other funders include Anthropic, Flu Lab, the OpenAI Foundation, Bill Gates, and several traders from the quantitative investing fund Jane Street Capital, an Intercept spokesperson said.
Nan Ransohoff, a Stripe executive leading the initiative, said respiratory infections are often treated as a minor nuisance despite their significant societal burden. The average person spends 5 percent of their lifetime fighting a cold or flu. Drug companies have historically invested little in cold prevention because the more than 200 different viruses causing colds make it less commercially attractive than other research areas, Ransohoff said.
Stripe previously organized a $1.8 billion program, Frontier, for carbon removal technology. Ransohoff noted that both carbon removal and virus eradication are "technically possible" but "lack commercial incentives." The concept for Intercept developed after Ransohoff discussed broad countermeasures against multiple viruses with David Veesler, a structural biologist and vaccine designer at the University of Washington. Veesler said modern tools like RNA drugs, antibodies, and computational protein design offer new possibilities, such as engineered virus-grabbing proteins for nasal sprays.
The project draws inspiration from the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. Intercept's advisers will include Peter Marks, a former top FDA official, and Moncef Slaoui, who led the U.S. coronavirus vaccine effort, Operation Warp Speed. A key challenge for Intercept will be developing methods to counter many viruses simultaneously, which accounts for its interest in air-cleaning technologies like strong ultraviolet light to inactivate airborne viruses.
Full Article: Stripe, Anthropic and OpenAI are backing an effort to stop respiratory infections