Preventing the next pandemic
Director-General of WHO announcing the launch of The Trinity Challenge—a program led by Patrick Diamond while working at MIT Solve in 2021.
Methods used
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The practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by gathering contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.
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A tool that allowed challenge judges to rank innovations by preference. Judges for the Trinity Challenge used this approach to organize preferences among a large, interdisciplinary group.
The Trinity Challenge is a coalition of partners united by the common aim of developing insights and actions to contribute to a world better protected from global health emergencies.
Envisioned by Prof Dame Sally Davies—master of Trinity College, Cambridge University, and former chief medical officer of the UK’s National Health Service—The Trinity Challenge aimed to better identify, respond to, and recover from outbreaks before they cause great harm.
The Need
COVID-19 is neither the first nor the last disease that has spread worldwide. In fact, ongoing pandemics have run concurrently with the coronavirus, further challenging public health responses. The virus has shown the vulnerabilities and strengths of public health, technology, and governance.
There must be better ways of dealing with the next pandemic—or even preventing it from happening in the first place.
The Solution
The Trinity Challenge awarded $7.13 million in prize funding to innovations with the abilities to identify, respond to, and recover from outbreaks before they cause great harm.
While an employee of MIT Solve, Patrick Diamond led a crowdsourcing campaign to identify solutions needed to prevent the next pandemic.
The Results
$7.13 million in prize funding awarded to eight innovations from a pool of 340 applications from 61 countries.
$1.8 million grand prize award—among Solve’s largest grant to date—awarded to PODD, which is helping 20,000 livestock farmers identify potential emergent diseases before they spread. The funding will allow PODD to reach farmers in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Uganda, and Vietnam.