This map was created as part of a toolkit we are using to better understand how our capabilities can be incorporated to the various efforts to fight COVID-19. Both our core computational antibody optimization offering (previously in stealth, but which we are announcing today and making available to any party making anti-COVID-19 antibodies - free of charge) and our population-scale NGS diagnostic protocol have the potential to play valuable roles during various phases of the pandemic. However, given our own extremely limited resources and the broader resource constraints faced by our industry, it is important we have a framework in place for ensuring that we are developing to an achievable scale. It is also important that we understand what criteria should be used to prioritize deployment.
As events have unfolded, the importance of highly-localized phenomena in determining what kinds of capabilities can and should be brought to bear, and how this affects the relative applicability of the solutions we are developing, has been highlighted again and again. The ability to answer questions around such matters as where best to try to deploy our mass-parallel NGS-based diagnostic protocol in the absence of a specialized facility, or whether it is even possible to manufacture enough antibody to be relevant to the outbreak (and how), once a viable antibody or cocktail of antibodies has been “discovered,” is almost entirely reliant upon having a detailed understanding of localized outbreak dynamics. We developed this map, and related tooling, as a means of incorporating such localized phenomena into our decision-making.
We will be elaborating in the coming days on how we are using this map and other tools to work through these and other questions, and we will be both exposing new map layers and making available as much of the underlying calculus as we can as we progress. In the interest of providing a slightly different perspective on the pandemic and its impact on the United States, we are launching the map today with a focus on highlighting the risks local and regional health care systems face as the pandemic spreads across the country.
We have been inspired and humbled by the response to the outbreak, and we produced this resource to address both our own needs for COVID-19 planning, and also in the hope that it can help as many people as possible contextualize, plan, and respond to COVID-19.
We would love any feedback you may have - be it questions, comments, requests for analysis, or even complaints. Whatever the context or content, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. And in the meantime, we hope you and yours remain as unscathed as possible by this outbreak, and that life returns to a healthy normal, soon.