VUMC partners with DARPA on five-year effort to fight pandemics

A five-year partnership agreement has been reached between the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), representing a $28 million investment in the fight against viral outbreaks.

DARPA’s Pandemic Protection Platform will be used to develop protective antibody treatments that can be rapidly dispersed to healthcare providers around the world within 60 days of an outbreak–an ambitious break from the months countermeasures currently take to create and distribute. The lab of James Crowe Jr., director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, has isolated human monoclonal antibodies for a number of pathogenic viruses, while Crowe himself is a pioneer of the rational design for neutralizing antibody treatments and vaccines. Under the terms of the new agreement, Crowe and his colleagues will create a pipeline for rapid discovery of pathogens, protective antigens and development of antibody therapeutics.

“We need to be able to move at this speed considering how quickly outbreaks can get out of control,” Col. Matthew Hepburn, DARPA’s P3 program manager, said in a statement. “The technology needs to work on any viral disease, whether it’s one humans have faced before or not.”

The agreement specifically points to chikungunya, Ebola, Zika, and the H1N1 influenza virus as examples of what they are fighting. Given that those outbreaks of infectious disease with pandemic potential are likely to continue in the future, they are trying to evolve how antiviral interventions are made as well.