Stripe, Anthropic and OpenAI to fight respiratory infections

Payments company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new $500 million nonprofit whose goal will be to prevent both the common cold and the flu.

Its ultimate goal is to completely eliminate respiratory viruses. The new organization, called Intercept, will use grants and investments to support prevention approaches, including vaccines, as well as large-scale air purification systems for schools, offices and other public spaces.

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In addition to Stripe, other backers include Anthropic, Flu Lab and the OpenAI Foundation, as well as Bill Gates and several other traders from the investment fund Jane Street Capital, according to a spokesperson for The Intercept.

“I think we treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but we’ve really underestimated the burden they impose on society,” says Nan Ransohoff, a Stripe executive who is leading the initiative along with Charlie Petty, a venture capitalist who joined Stripe this year.

On average, people spend 5 percent of their lives fighting a cold or the flu, according to Ransohoff. Yet drug companies put relatively little effort into preventing colds. Part of the problem is that rhinitis is caused by more than 200 different viruses, according to the American Lung Association, with rhinoviruses being the most common culprit.

There are so many that it’s usually not worth trying to stop any of them with a vaccine. “When pharmaceutical companies look at it, it’s not as attractive as other things they could be working on,” Ransohoff says. “So it hasn’t attracted the necessary resources.”

The project is inspired by the efforts to combat the COVID-19 virus, where Veesler’s team was among those involved in the rapid development of vaccines, antiviral drugs and antibodies. According to Ransohoff, Intercept’s advisors will include Peter Marks, a former top FDA official, and Moncef Slaoui, the pharmaceutical company executive who led the U.S. coronavirus vaccination effort, Operation Warp Speed.

A key challenge for Intercept will be finding ways to tackle multiple viruses at once. That explains the interest in air-purifying technology, such as using powerful ultraviolet light to ward off viruses. The idea, the team says, is to remove them from the air in the same way that municipalities remove impurities from water supplies before they are piped into people’s homes.

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