Pandemic Response Supermind Activation
About the Pandemic Response Supermind Activation
The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, and MilliporeSigma—the life science business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany—convened more than 180 experts and global leaders in science, healthcare, public policy, and other sectors for a three-week exercise to address the following challenge:
How can we develop pandemic resilience—the ability for society to recover quickly from global disease outbreaks—both in resolving the current COVID-19 pandemic and in building the public health and other infrastructure to prepare for future pandemics?
We activated the expert group—or ‘Supermind’—to share their ideas on how to address this challenge in five domain areas: (1) diagnostics and monitoring; (2) viral transmission control; (3) therapies and vaccines; (4) validating, sharing, and communicating scientific insights; and (5) pandemic preparedness.
Over the next couple of months, we are releasing chapter installments of the findings, which will be featured below.
What’s Next?
Based on the actionable themes that emerged during the Pandemic Supermind Activation, we will generate a series of open crowdsourcing challenges for global communities to contribute via our newly launched platform, the Pandemic Response CoLab. The Pandemic Response CoLab will help individuals and groups work together to solve practical problems created by the COVID-19 pandemic. See open challenges here.