Grant: Operating Grant: Leadership Award for Vaccine Res. - CEPI-CIHR

When a new and dangerous virus emerges, our ability to quickly diagnose it and develop an effective vaccine is critical to saving lives. Currently, this process can be too slow to contain an emerging outbreak and stop it from becoming a pandemic. This project proposes a new, faster way to tackle this problem using artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of focusing only on the virus, we will teach computers to recognize the unique "fingerprint" of our own response to the infection creates when it fights off a specific infection. By analyzing thousands of these fingerprints from public data and our own lab work, our AI will learn to instantly identify a disease and, just as importantly, determine if a vaccine is successfully training our bodies to fight it. The goal is to create rapid diagnostic tests and a method to speed up vaccine evaluation that can be easily used even in remote or low-resource areas. This will make Canada and the world better prepared to face the next pandemic threat, whatever it may be.