P3: Pandemic Prevention Platform (2017) • Hacker News Board

vharuck wrote: post #12

I don't remember hearing anything about the US military being involved in the recent Ebola outbreak, so is this an existing program or a proposal?

This article says there are currently 4 P3 teams: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/bionics/da...

Re: P3: Pandemic Prevention Platform (2017)

#17

Post by casefields » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

m3kw9 wrote: post #8

It all sounds good but I’m not sure if they could do all that in 60 days with human trials needed to test actual efficiency, toxicity, etc. If you are talking about just a candidate drug yeah, that is possible with today’s tech.

They are 2 for 2 already:

>The teams have proven they can meet this ambitious timeline in previous trials using the influenza and Zika viruses.

Re: P3: Pandemic Prevention Platform (2017)

#18

Post by _tfi1 » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

So this has already been tested in humans: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

"Antibody level predicted to protect against chikungunya infection achieved within hours; projected to be maintained for at least 16 weeks at the middle and high doses"

Re: P3: Pandemic Prevention Platform (2017)

#19

Post by OceanSunfish » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 1:09 AM UTC

These briefs don't mention it by name, but this technology seems like "DNA Vaccination" that has been in research for some years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_vaccination

Re: P3: Pandemic Prevention Platform (2017)

#20

Post by wespiser_2018 » Fri, Mar 13, 2020, 1:34 AM UTC

Disease prevention has been in DARPAs wheelhouse for a while now. While in grad school, a couple groups at my school worked on a project to predict the future evolution of influenza, so the vaccine order in March will be relevant to the strains dominate in November. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-06-13a The last time I heard an update, it was that prediction was very difficult as unpredictable random mutation was dominating strain evolution.