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Why sound, strong science alone isn’t enough in pandemic preparedness
Melissa Hobson is a freelance marine-science journalist based in Hastings, UK.
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Polina Brangel is using tools such as artificial intelligence to strengthen pandemic preparedness.
More than five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers continue to try to anticipate the next global disease outbreak that could cost millions of lives and cause economic chaos. Polina Brangel, a research-and-development data-innovation lead at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), headquartered in Oslo, is trying to prevent this.
Brangel began studying biotechnology engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel in 2007, graduating from her combined programme with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2012. Later that year, she began her PhD in bioengineering and biomedical engineering at Imperial College London.
Her role was originally focused on biosensor development for oncology diagnostics, but Brangel became involved in developing rapid diagnostic (lateral flow) tests to detect various cancer biomarkers. When Ebola broke out in West Africa in 2014 and the World Health Organization (WHO) called for rapid, simple and accurate tests for the disease, Brangel realized that she had the right tools but was using them for a different purpose.
The decision to repurpose her work to tackle Ebola led to a career in pandemic preparedness, and she joined CEPI in 2023. She has developed tests to understand the immunological biomarkers found in people who have recovered from Ebola, has studied the immune response elicited by COVID-19 and now focuses on protecting people from ‘Disease X’.
Brangel spoke to Nature about her work in the field, what she has learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic that could help prevent future pandemics and the part artificial intelligence is playing in preparedness efforts.
Disease X is the term, coined by the WHO in its 2018 Research & Development Blueprint for Epidemics, for a hypothetical pathogen that infects humans. The WHO created a list of priority pathogens deemed likely to cause a pandemic that have no available countermeasures, such as vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics. The list includes the viruses that cause Ebola, Lassa fever and Rift Valley fever.
As serology technical officer at the WHO, I was trying to understand the immune response elicited by COVID-19. With infectious diseases, you do a sero-epidemiology study: drawing blood from a small cohort of people, looking at immune-response antibodies to work out how many individuals had been infected and extrapolating to derive the prevalence in the population.