A sprawling, multi-institution effort for “predicting” future pathogen characteristics, developing vaccines “in advance of need,” and building the very systems intended to validate those predictions.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent the early 2010s constructing what may have been the most ambitious predictive vaccine-development infrastructure ever attempted: a sprawling, multi-institution effort designed to determine the future characteristics of purported pathogens before they emerged and ultimately use those predictions to develop drugs and vaccines before they were needed.
The program, known as PROPHECY—short for Pathogen Defeat—was announced in 2010 under Broad Agency Announcement DARPA-BAA-10-93 and was managed by DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.
DARPA itself described the vaccine-centric purpose of the program unambiguously.
According to the agency: “The Prophecy (Pathogen Defeat) program will explore the evolution of viruses in the hopes of predicting viral mutations and ultimately developing drugs and vaccines in advance of need.”
The effort was not limited to coronaviruses, influenza, or any other single disease category.
DARPA repeatedly stated that the goal was understanding: “the natural evolution of any virus.”
The result was a massive architecture that brought together machine learning researchers, statisticians, bioinformaticians, computational biologists, laboratory scientists, surveillance specialists, universities, contractors, and national laboratories into a single “predictive” framework.
Yesterday, this website reported that DARPA’s PROPHECY program expanded into the laboratory of coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric years before the COVID-19 pandemic and nearly a decade before the DARPA/DEFUSE proposal documented all three defining structural features of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein prior to the outbreak.
Hellbound and Down 