This Foundation Is Filling a Gap in Global Public Health With $100 Million Award

Sentinel plans to deepen its work in Nigeria and Sierra Leone while expanding to three other countries over the next five years. (Sentinel/John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Key Points

• Sentinel, a project focused on pandemic prevention, received a five-year, $100 million award from the MacArthur Foundation.
• The funding will enable Sentinel to expand its infectious disease surveillance and response work across Africa.
• Sentinel’s approach involves cutting-edge technology, global collaboration, and local empowerment to address critical health problems.

Sentinel, a pandemic prevention project that equips communities with skills and tools to identify and track infectious disease, is receiving $100 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to scale their work in Africa.

This $100 million award, announced on Tuesday, is being granted as world governments are stepping back from funding global health, a fact not lost on the MacArthur Foundation or the winning project of its third global 100&Change competition.

“These resources come at a time that is critical for global health and especially for epidemic and pandemic preparedness,” Christian Happi, director of the Institute of Genomics and Global Health at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, said in an interview.

Happi and Pardis Sabeti, a “core institute member” of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Universities, founded and co-lead Sentinel.

In a statement, John Palfrey, president of the foundation, said Sentinel “will transform infectious disease surveillance and response through cutting-edge technology, global collaboration, and local empowerment,” at a moment when “investments in global public health are at risk.”

The $100 million award is the culmination of a global competition to provide an organization—or a partnership of organizations—with an amount that is considered transformative for fulfilling a bold, large-scale proposal “that promises real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time.”

The award was granted through the MacArthur competition and managed through its nonprofit affiliate, Lever for Change. The last award was granted in April 2021 to Community Solutions, which is using the funds to expand its mission of ending homelessness in 75 communities throughout the U.S.

Sabeti, whose lab has “pioneered genomic and computational technologies for detecting, tracking, and containing deadly pathogens, including Ebola, Zika, Lassa, SARS-CoV-2, and Plasmodium falciparum malaria,” according to the Broad Institute, initially began working with Happi in a remote area of Nigeria to explore whether there could be genetic resistance to Lassa—a viral hemorrhagic fever.

In working closely with a local hospital to establish diagnostics for the disease and to ensure they could support the standard of care required, they ended up transforming the hospital’s “ability to fight one of the most devastating diseases it was contending with,” Sabeti said in an interview. “We had by accident created what we call a sentinel site.”

The work became the foundation that led to a grant from the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. and later the World Bank that allowed Sabeti and Happi to expand their work. It was a strategy that proved effective during the Ebola outbreak in 2014-15 in West Africa, and then in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, which is also when Sentinel officially launched.

Recently, Sentinel worked to contain a variant of the mpox virus in Sierra Leone that broke out late last year. At its peak, the rate of infection was doubling every two weeks, Sabeti says. Sentinel “was able to generate a large number of genomes from this virus” to track its escalation and show “there were a lot of cases out there—cryptic cases—that were not being caught,” she says.

A coordinated effort established to understand the disease on a national level, and donations in support of diagnostics by private companies, such as U.S. biotech Illumina, allowed for increased testing throughout the country that stopped the outbreak from escalating further, she adds.

“It’s an amazing testament to what can happen when you have that access to data and then collective action and global cooperation,” Sabeti says.

Sentinel’s work in Nigeria and Sierra Leone—which it plans to deepen within while expanding to three other countries over the next five years—meet an important criteria for MacArthur, and that’s creating an evidence-based solution that can be scaled, according to Chris Cardona, managing director, Exploration, Discovery, and Programs at the MacArthur Foundation.

Sentinel works “at a significant scale already, and this will certainly be a shot in the arm to help them expand their work to other countries in Africa,” Cardona said in an interview. “It stood out for addressing a problem that’s globally relevant, like pandemics, but doing so in a way that combines expertise across borders.”

It “also builds capacity on the ground in ways that are lasting,” Cardona says.

Of nearly 870 applications for the 100&Change competition, 48 finalists were entered into Lever for Change’s Bold Solutions Network—which includes more than 350 vetted organizations that often receive funding from other donors.

Sentinel was selected among the final five finalists, which included the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a cross-border investigative journalism model; Pratham USA, an educational nonprofit that seeks to scale a methodology of teaching children based on their current learning levels (rather than their age or grade) to children living in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; Texas Children’s Hospital, which aims to integrate care for sickle cell into primary health services in Africa; and the Wikimedia Foundation, which is working to ensure all of its content is available in the 300-plus languages on its platform.

Write to Abby Schultz at abby.schultz@barrons.com