Project

Pandemic Supermind Activation

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MIT CCI & Millipore Sigma

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The Pandemic Supermind Activation brings together leaders in the biosciences and beyond, harnessing the power of humans and technology to identify the critical unmet needs of the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing this main challenge; 

How can we develop pandemic resilience—the ability for society to recover quickly from global disease outbreaks—both in resolving the current COVID-19 pandemic and in building the public health and other infrastructure to prepare for future pandemics? ​ 

The Pandemic Supermind Activation brings together leaders in the biosciences and beyond, harnessing the power of humans and technology to identify the critical unmet needs of the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing this main challenge; 

How can we develop pandemic resilience—the ability for society to recover quickly from global disease outbreaks—both in resolving the current COVID-19 pandemic and in building the public health and other infrastructure to prepare for future pandemics? ​ 

Research Topics
#covid19

Copyright

Not for reuse without permission

Groups will address these five technical areas: 

  • Diagnostics and Monitoring. What diagnostics, surveillance and contact-tracing innovations show most promise and where are the gaps (knowledge, innovation areas)?  
  • Transmission Control. What are technologies, policies, resources, or other methodologies that can be employed to reduce viral transmission?
  • Therapies and vaccines. How can we best accelerate the discovery of therapies and vaccines? ​
  • Validating and Sharing Scientific Insights. Understanding the virus biology holds the key for developing any sustainable and permanent solution either for this or any future threat.  As new research is generated, how do we ensure that scientific insights can be rapidly validated, confirmed, shared, and used to drive solutions? ​ 
  • Pandemic Preparedness. How can we best prepare infrastructure across sectors—from basic research, to public health, to development and deployment of diagnostics and treatments—to increase systemic resiliency for future pandemics? ​ 

    Who’s organizing this?

    Pandemic Supermind Activation is a project of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the Community Biotechnology Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. It builds on a decade of work on MIT Climate CoLab, a platform where more than 120,000 people are working together to develop novel ideas to address climate change. Millipore Sigma is a founding collaborator.

Read the press release Initial findings