Biotechnology company Apriori Bio has been awarded US $1.1 million from CEPI to advance its biology-informed artificial intelligence platform Octavia™, aimed at protecting humanity against rapidly evolving viruses by designing variant-resilient vaccines.

The Octavia platform works by characterising large libraries of viral variants on their ability to bind to cells in the human body and evade the immune response. Then using machine learning, Octavia generates maps to identify the mutations that have the greatest ‘escape potential’ and could therefore pose the greatest threat. These insights can guide how new vaccines are designed and how existing vaccines are updated so that they can protect against worrisome variants for years to come.

Experts can also use Octavia’s real-time variant insights to inform public health decisions and policies against some of the world’s most deadly diseases. Having this information ‘a  priori’ – before things appear – can significantly enhance the world’s pandemic readiness and ability to respond to an outbreak in as little as 100 days.