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Google Awards More Than $14 Million in Grants for Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention

By Amesh Adalja, November 3, 2008

On October 21, 2008, the philanthropic division of Google, Google.org, announced the award of grants totaling more than $14 million to aid efforts to prevent the next disease pandemic. Through Google.org’s Predict and Prevent initiative, awardees will undertake efforts to identify disease hot spots and detect outbreaks earlier.¹

Such efforts include:

• Mapping settlement expansion via satellite in tropical regions;
• Linking meteorologists with health specialists in order to couple rainfall forecasting data with disease prediction;
• Establishing a repository of animal and human blood from inhabitants of predicted disease locales to search for new viruses;
• Funding efforts to speed the molecular diagnostic capability to identify new pathogens.¹

In the news release announcing the awards, Dr. Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org, stated that “The teams we're funding today are on the frontiers of digital and genetic early detection technology. We hope that their work…will help solve centuries-old problems and save millions of lives."¹

References

1. Google.org battles bugs & viruses: Announces more than $14 million in grants to partners working to predict and prevent the next pandemic [news release]. Mountain View, CA: Google.org; October 21, 2008. http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20081021_googleorg.html. Accessed October 29, 2008.