The corporate researchers hoping to help fend off the next pandemic

Welcome back. The COP16 biodiversity summit was suspended without completing its agenda items on Saturday morning after an 11-hour closing plenary session that ran far beyond the scheduled end time. So many delegates had been leaving to catch flights home that the meeting could no longer form a quorum.

But the conference did reach a formal deal on payments by companies that use genetic data from nature, one of the hottest issues at the conference. Companies in sectors like pharma will now be expected to pay 0.1 per cent of revenue or 1 per cent of profit into a new fund supporting biodiversity protection.

Those payments are set to be voluntary (though the agreement “invites” countries to consider legislation). But the deal is significant in introducing the principle of regular environmental protection payments by companies as a cost of doing business — a potentially huge source of funding. My report on the outcome is here. Meanwhile, in today’s newsletter, Kaori explores how medical companies’ attention to the natural world could help to protect against future pandemics.

I’m back in London briefly before heading to the COP29 climate summit in Baku, which begins next Monday. The private-sector presence will be smaller than last year, but the actual negotiations will be hugely significant, especially on the crunch issue of international finance.

Meanwhile, I’m informed there’s an election happening tomorrow that could prove quite consequential — especially for the energy transition, both in the US and around the world. — Simon Mundy

emerging diseases

Enter the ‘virus hunters’

Disease-carrying ticks hitchhiking on migratory birds are travelling faster and farther thanks to higher wind speeds caused by climate change, according to a study led by US healthcare and medical device company Abbott Laboratories.

The study found that a type of tick that can spread the deadly severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS), had expanded its range as a result of higher wind speeds.

The tick, native to east Asia, “can now be found in the US, in Australia and New Zealand . . . so it’s now something that we need to keep a closer look on,” said Gavin Cloherty, head of infectious disease research for Abbott’s diagnostic business. SFTS is known to have a fatality rate of up to 40 per cent.

Abbott’s study is among research being conducted by a group of scientists at the company’s Pandemic Defense Coalition programme, which Cloherty heads. It also points to the growing trend of corporate efforts to address an uptick of infectious diseases because of climate change.

The coalition, also known colloquially as Abbott’s “virus hunters”, was formed in 2021 and has 22 partners in 19 countries, spanning five continents. The aim is to detect emerging viruses that could potentially pose a pandemic-level threat.

“We find [the virus], we share it with the public, but we also get to work on making a prototype test,” Mary Rodgers, associate research fellow at Abbott, told me. 

“We’re hopefully not only helping to end current epidemics, but [also helping] prevent future pandemics with the viruses that we’re facing,” she said.

To know whether a virus poses a major threat, you first need diagnostic capabilities to know who is infected.

“That’s where the test and that initial surveillance work is so important,” Rodgers stressed. The coalition will routinely monitor viruses to ensure tests respond accurately to new variants.

As a major diagnostic test maker, the coalition serves a dual purpose for the company. The millions of dollars that Abbott has invested in the coalition supports its 2030 sustainability plan, while also providing the tangible business benefit of helping the company develop its pipeline of products to discover new viruses.

For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the coalition was behind the roll out of Abbott’s Covid tests, which helped the company reach a record annual revenue of $43.7bn in 2022. “Once that [Covid-19 virus] sequence was made public, within two days, we had designed the test that’s still standing up today,” Cloherty said.

Climate change will exacerbate about 50 per cent of known diseases, according to a Nature article published in 2022. This includes factors such as increased flooding, which will proliferate waterborne diseases, and warmer temperatures which will increase the range of disease-carrying vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks.

Moderna is currently developing vaccines for Zika and Nipah viruses, as well as Lyme disease, which have all been identified as illnesses that could spread more rapidly as a result of climate change, according to the Nature study.

The company’s mRNA platform and ability to quickly scale up its manufacturing “offers us a unique opportunity to help respond to some of these shifting diseases”, Hamilton Bennett, Moderna’s senior director of vaccine access and partnerships, told me. 

“Without environmental containment methods, malaria will increase its footprint. Dengue will increase. Chikungunya will increase, the risk of Zika will expand,” Bennett told me. “There are so many ways in which the infectious disease landscape is influenced by climate change and our interaction with the environment. It’s quite substantial,” she warned.

Yet, spending on research and development in emerging infectious diseases by large pharmaceutical companies remains limited. According to the non-profit organisation Impact Global Health, there is a funding gap of $21.4bn for priority pathogens that the World Health Organization has flagged as having epidemic or pandemic potential.

Johnson & Johnson, for example, recently announced it would discontinue its study on antiviral treatment for dengue.

The lack of investment was already apparent in 2022, when the Dutch non-profit organisation Access to Medicine Foundation found that “for the majority of emerging infectious diseases identified as a priority, there are no projects in the pipelines of the world’s largest R&D-based pharmaceutical companies” — a surprising and disconcerting fact, given that the Covid-19 pandemic is not too far in the rear-view mirror. (Kaori Yoshida, Nikkei)

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