Children's Health Defense By
Scientists are developing a proprietary “early warning system” — powered by CRISPR gene-editing technology — to “detect and characterize deadly pathogens” in Africa “before they spread across the globe,” STAT News reported.
The surveillance system — dubbed Sentinel — was launched with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others. It uses “participatory” digital health tools developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Sentinel’s lead developers are Pardis Sabeti, M.D., D.Phil., and Christian Happi, Ph.D., who are patenting the technology to commercialize it in the U.S.
Sabeti is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Harvard professor and director of the Broad Institute’s Sabeti Lab. Happi is a professor of molecular biology and genomics at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, an adjunct professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard and director of the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), a genomic research institute focused on Africa, which he co-founded with Sabeti in Nigeria…
