- Malaria, Ebola, Zika, Lassa fever, yellow fever
and now COVID-19.
Mankind has been fighting microorganisms
for thousands of years and they've always won
and they are still winning.
- COVID exposed to the general public,
what people in infectious diseases
have known for a really long time.
We don't have a system to detect emergent threats.
- By the time we have details on a new outbreak,
it's usually too late to contain it,
but we can change that.
Sentinel is an early warning system
that relies on CRISPR technology
and frontline healthcare workers,
to detect emerging diseases before they start a pandemic.
- These viruses have been hunting us for millennia
and now we have the tools and technologies to identify them,
and stop them as soon as they emerge.
- I think it is high time to play offense
instead of continuing to play defense.
(instrumental music)
(engine revving)
I'm Christian Happi, Director of the Africa Centre
of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases.
- I'm Dr. Pardis Sabeti.
I'm a Computational Biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT
and Harvard.
- Pardis and Christian have been working together
for over 20 years to combat the spread of viruses worldwide.
- We started becoming really aware that so many
of these infectious diseases were just going undetected.
It started with just training a few of our lab staff
and having a back and forth between the U.S. and Africa
and creating a network.
We were just launching that when Ebola hit.
- For weeks now, an outbreak of highly contagious
Ebola virus has gripped Guinea.
- And what we did then was, train people across
the region on how to diagnose the disease.
- And we were poised and positioned in our field sites
in Sierra Leone and in Nigeria to set up diagnostics
right away.
And as a result, the teams in both of those countries
diagnosed the first cases of Ebola in those countries.
- Nigeria had to act fast and the number of Ebola deaths
was limited to eight.
- That is incredible for an outbreak to happen in a city
like Lagos with more than 20 million people.
- Their successful work in disease outbreaks led Christian
and Pardis to develop Sentinel, a comprehensive program
designed to detect emerging viruses before they spread
and stop them in their tracks.
Part of Sentinel is a new generation of sensitive
and affordable tests.
One of them is called SHERLOCK.
- SHERLOCK is a technology that we're using for diagnosis
that is based on CRISPR and CRISPR was originally identified
as a bacteria's immune system to viruses.
And in SHERLOCK, we've been using that CRISPR technology
to detect viruses.
- Essentially CRISPR molecules are programmed
to detect specific viruses in human fluid samples.
If the test cannot identify a virus,
it's likely something humans haven't seen before.
In that case, genomic sequencing can be used to identify
the new virus and create new SHERLOCK tests within 24 hours.
- It essentially leads to field deployable, cheap
sensitive, rapidly programmable diagnostics.
And that's what you need to move quickly in responding
to infectious disease.
- Creating a rapid testing system for outbreaks
is essential, but it's only useful if you have a lot
of people using it on the ground.
- You cannot address pandemics only with tools
and technologies, you need people and those people,
they are the community health workers.
Over the past five years, we've trained over a thousand
healthcare workers in West Africa to detect
known and unknown pathogens,
connect this information directly
to the public health authorities,
and then facilitate what we'll call
a coordination of response at country level,
and then at continental level,
and at global level.
- Part of that coordinated approach is creating apps
that community health workers can use to share
the data they collect with local
and national public health officials.
With COVID-19, developers are getting an opportunity
to road test their products.
- We were going to work on this project
over the course of five years,
thinking about infectious disease in general,
but then when the COVID-19 pandemic hit,
we've been focusing on how do we quickly prototype
and get initial versions out of the applications
we've been envisioning, so that we could use them
in COVID-19 response.
Fathom is working on Scout and Lookout,
which are part of the broader Sentinel project.
Scout is for individual users to be able to track
their symptoms daily, as well as keep track
of their contacts.
And the other application is Lookout,
which is the desktop dashboard,
where the administrators can kind of keep track
of everything that's going on.
- I can tell you that since March,
my lab has been doing only COVID.
We are testing for the country,
we are also doing the sequencing
to guide public health response.
We are working in various cross collaborations with
the state government, with the federal government,
through the Nigeria Center for Disease Control.
- I think really this is the biggest benefit
that Sentinel provides is that it pulls together science
and public health into collaborations
that will hopefully make the world a safer place
to live in.
- The most important challenge that we have as a continent
is the ability to manage information and knowledge.
We are a country with 1.2 billion people,
the tendency is to see a lot of fragmentation.
Africa and CDC can work with Sentinel to really scale
that up and promote it across the continent.
- Today, we've realized that the world is such
a global village.
It takes 36 hours for the disease that started
in a small place in Nigeria to get to San Francisco
or New York.
So it means that we are so interconnected.
We need to really sit down and then think about
how we can create a world that is more equitable,
where there is equity,
where people understand that regardless of where you are,
you can access medicine, you can access drugs,
you can access vaccine, you can access diagnostics.
That's the driving force behind what we're doing.
- It sounds like a really big idea.
It was a very small idea when we started.
The approach to it is not that I'm gonna change the world,
it's actually just looking at a problem,
finding a partner that you'd wanna work with
on that problem.
And it's actually something very small.
It's something very intimate.
Every part of this, we must do better.
We should never be in a situation again,
in which we have to stop the world to stop a pandemic.
So for me, it's getting us to that better place
that we've now got the world's attention
and it's on us to take this moment
and not let it slip through our fingers.
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