{shortcode-7c1c1fe1478644378023c62501cbdded659c1381}

Sentinel, a project based at Harvard and MIT’s Broad Institute that aims to track the spread of pathogens in Africa and prevent future infectious disease outbreaks, earned a $100 million award last month through the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition.

The new funding will help keep Sentinel research going despite cutbacks to federal grants that have funded it in the past, said Harvard professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Pardis C. Sabeti, one of Sentinel’s co-leaders.

Sentinel officially launched in 2020, but researchers had been developing the ideas behind it for almost two decades, according to Sabeti.

The project, which was created in collaboration with the Institute of Genomics and Global Health in Nigeria, seeks to monitor diseases like Lassa fever and Ebola viruses, which have spread undetected in Africa, and act as an early warning system that allows public health officials to mount early defenses against pandemics.

Sentinel has already trained more than 3,000 public health workers across Africa on technologies to detect and respond to outbreaks. Its surveillance suite, Lookout, has become a national dashboard for monitoring outbreaks in Sierra Leone, and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention is considering adopting the tools continentally, according to Sabeti.

But as the team waited to learn whether they would win the MacArthur award, Sentinel “sustained some really bruising, debilitating federal cuts,” Sabeti said.

Because Sentinel is based at the Broad Institute, it was not directly affected by the Trump administration’s freeze on more than $2 billion in federal funding to Harvard this spring, but it was hit hard by broader cuts to global health and infectious disease research funding, according to Sabeti. The losses forced a “large layoff” at Sentinel this summer, she wrote in an email.

“It’s existential for us. If we did not get this — we faced one major cliff, and we were facing kind of the last one for the type of work we’re trying to do,” Sabeti said. “So this is suddenly a massive — not just a lifeline, but an opportunity to make a major change.”

“It was pretty extraordinary,” she added.

The MacArthur Foundation has held the global 100&Change competition every four years since 2017. In each of its two previous cycles, the foundation awarded funding to projects it said demonstrated “a single proposal that promises real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time.”

Sentinel invested more than a year into the latest cycle of the competition, beginning its application in spring 2024, Sabeti said. She said the process of securing the award was “long” and “intensive,” involving multiple rounds of review that helped her appreciate the work of all of Sentinel’s competitors, too.

Winning the award “made me think more about how lucky I was and how I now had a debt to pay in supporting others,” Sabeti said.

With the award, the team hopes to focus on making its diagnostics and analytics more cost effective so that “anybody, anywhere can do it,” in order to reduce the turnaround time for responding to pandemics, according to Sabeti.

“The way outbreaks can rapidly escalate and can spread exponentially, any moment lost becomes orders of magnitude greater work in order to stop it,” she said.

“We’ve got some really big opportunities in front of us. Things are moving,” Sabeti added. “It’s daunting, but really exciting also to figure out how we can serve the broader community.”