To guard against another pandemic, we need decisive action from both civil society and the private sector

Individual efforts can be accelerated by forming the right collaborations that bring sector-spanning capabilities together, from computer engineers and data scientists to epidemiologists and physicians, writes Sally Davies and Vilas Dhar

‘The challenges of responding to pandemics are complex and require global coordination’ (REUTERS)

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate community after community, many global leaders are still unpacking why we were so unprepared. The challenges of responding to pandemics (or any similarly-scaled crisis) are complex and require global coordination, especially through representative bodies such as the UN, WHO or G7 that can summon collective will and build lasting improvements.

With the recent G7 summit, we saw progress with joint commitments on antimicrobial resistance, boosting global vaccine supply and global taxes; nevertheless, these commitments will take years or decades to bear fruit.

Recognising the need for fast and responsive multi-sector engagement and action, a coalition of civil society and private sector actors came together in The Trinity Challenge, with founding members including companies (Optum, GSK, Facebook, Tencent, Google, Legal and General, Reckitt, BD), non-profits (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation), and academia (Northeastern University, Hong Kong University, University of Cambridge) and many others.

For Trinity Challenge members, bypassing the usual obstacles to global cooperation and moving quickly toward solutions was paramount to saving lives. In just nine months, we accomplished an extraordinary feat.

We brought together a broad coalition of leaders who rarely sit at the same table – tech executives and research scientists, clinicians and public health experts, philanthropists and social changemakers. We challenged them to find new ways to protect the world from Covid-19 and future pandemics.

This community has come together across borders and sectors to nurture outstanding ideas with time and expertise, and stands ready to help the best ideas achieve their full potential, including contributing more than $8m (£5.7m) for immediate implementation of the best ideas. In the course of this effort, our members identified three key principles of The Trinity Challenge – a bias to action, a recognition of the need for cross-cutting partnerships, and a belief in the power of technology.

We have seen first-hand that with the right resources, innovators can move faster to implement practical solutions. Trinity Challenge members, as well as many other organisations, stepped up during the pandemic to offer their talent, technology, data, or services for the greater good.

Tencent leveraged its technical capabilities to develop tools like a self-triage assistant and a platform for remote work and education collaboration. Cuebiq’s mobility data workbench was made available to UNICEF, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Oxford University and others to help analyse the spread of Covid-19 and policy effectiveness.

The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation’s Data and Society initiative launched to help nonprofits unlock the potential of data science and AI. Multiple large corporations opened their data through new platforms during the pandemic, including Google, Reckitt, Tencent, Microsoft and Facebook.

Individual efforts can be accelerated by forming the right collaborations that bring sector-spanning capabilities together, from computer engineers and data scientists to epidemiologists and physicians. The most impactful examples over the past 16 months were the fruits of collaboration, often bridging organisations across industry, academia, charities, and the public sector.

Ever-increasing technological innovation is a powerful tool to unlock new opportunities for fast impact. The growing digitisation of the world creates new ways for safe connection and preserving privacy across borders and sectors. The explosion of data sources and capture enables new ways of assessing the pandemic and identifying intervention points.

Machine learning and cloud platforms offer unprecedented analytics that deliver insights at population level. In the midst of Covid-19, many of our members were at the forefront of supplying these innovations. They supported epidemiologists and policymakers with analytical models and technology platforms. They opened access to novel data that unlocked new insights on effective policies, the causes of transmission, and the state of economic distress.

Yesterday, The Trinity Challenge announced the results of this collaboration: a portfolio of powerful, data-driven and technological solutions that will help deliver immediate action to combat pandemics, now and in the future. We received 340 applications from teams based in over 60 countries.

The eight winners of this Challenge bring forth truly innovative ideas and have teams well-positioned to execute on them. Our grand prize winner, PODD, will build an early warning system of circulating animal viruses by empowering farmers to report on diseased animals and bring in new data to anticipate pandemics before they happen.

Other winners bring a range of high-tech innovations to detect early signs of disease in human populations, including integrate multiple streams of data to predict spill-over risk, AI-powered signals from analysis of routinely administered blood count tests, natural language processing (NLP) and crowd-sourced physician notes to identify novel disease, and deployed sensors in air and sewage to pick-up the presence of new viruses.

The final set of winners are working to build resilience in the healthcare system and supply chains by making new digital platforms available to community health workers to capture data and provide the right guidance to patients safely or leveraging blockchain to track vaccines in remote settings so that none go wasted.

The lessons of this journey are clear. We need urgent, global coordination to respond to the world’s biggest challenges – and we cannot wait for it to happen by multilateral, slow moving actors. Partnerships between civil society and the private sector can create communities that foster change and lead to global, lifesaving impact. Technology is a powerful ally in our efforts to deliver rapid action.

The innovations surfaced by The Trinity Challenge will leave us better able to predict, respond and recover from the next crisis – and where innovation is needed, we’ve already built the table for a collaboration. Together, we can drive the creation of solutions that activate the very best of human research, innovative technical approaches, and our shared will to protect the world from its greatest threats.

Dame Sally Davies is the former chief medical officer for England. Vilas Dhar is president of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation