EpidemicsPreventing viral disease outbreaks

Avian influenza (H7N9). MERS coronavirus. Ebola. Hepatitis E. Yellow Fever. Lassa. Zika. When you consider the viral infectious diseases that emerged and reemerged around the world in 2017 alone, what many of them have in common is that they originated in animals and spilled over into humans after a series of mutations that enable the pathogens to jump species.

The U.S. Department of Defense has a vested interest in outmaneuvering infectious disease. Military service members are called upon to operate virtually anywhere in the world, often on short notice, and the locations to which they deploy frequently lack the robust public health infrastructure to identify and contain the spread of new viral infectious diseases. At the same time, numerous trends including increased interactions between human, animal, and insect populations due to globalization, densification of livestock production, and rising human encroachment into animal habitats have increased the threat of novel pathogens in regions where troops, humanitarian workers, and peacekeepers tend to deploy.

DARPA says that a new DARPA program called Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT, seeks to support military readiness by going after new viral infectious diseases at the source, animal reservoirs—the species in which a pathogen lives, multiplies, and potentially evolves into a strain that can threaten humans. PREEMPT aims to advance understanding of viruses and their interaction with animals, insects, and humans, and deliver new, proactive interventions to reduce the risk from emerging and reemerging pathogens.

“Despite global biosurveillance efforts, viral outbreaks continue to outpace medical preparedness. That means that in volunteering to be the first ones into harm’s way, our Service members can quite literally be among the first people exposed to emerging infectious diseases,” said Jim Gimlett, the PREEMPT program manager. “DARPA wants to reorient preparedness efforts to make them more proactive, so that instead of only modeling the trajectory of an epidemic as it spreads from human to human, we contain and suppress diseases in the animal species in which they originate before they can make a jump into people.”

PREEMPT will have two technical thrusts: development of multiscale models and test beds to quantify the imminent emergence and reemergence of human pathogens; and development of new, scalable approaches to preventing pathogen spillover and transmission