Ending respiratory infections

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Ending respiratory infections<br>Introducing Intercept, a $500M bet to make respiratory infections like colds and flu a thing of the past.

Nan Ransohoff, Charlie Petty, and Devin Sok<br>Jun 24, 2026

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A century ago, waterborne diseases levied similar costs to those posed by respiratory viruses like colds and influenza today: endemic, periodically epidemic, and widely accepted as an inevitable feature of human life. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, we decided they didn’t have to be. Pharmaceutical advances and clean water infrastructure made cholera, typhoid, and dysentery rare across much of the world within a matter of decades.<br>Why haven’t we already seen the same kind of transformation with respiratory viruses? Last August we hosted a symposium at Stripe with ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech venture capitalists, and regulatory experts to better understand if this is technically possible and, if so, why it hasn’t happened yet.<br>We heard two main reasons. First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, new platform technologies, advances in our understanding of human immunology, biological data sets, and protein design tools mean we have our strongest ever suite of approaches for tackling it.<br>Second, the development of the broad-spectrum solutions needed to solve the first problem has historically been underfunded, neither a great fit for philanthropic nor commercial funding. While COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn’t been sustained.<br>We believe that with enough focus and funding, these problems are tractable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of these new tools to catalyze the development of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies. Together, these technologies can radically reduce the burden of respiratory infections, and can eventually help eliminate them altogether.<br>Why this matters

Today, we treat respiratory infections like the cold and influenza as a minor nuisance. The evidence increasingly suggests otherwise.<br>Healthy people spend roughly 15-25 days each year—about 5% of their lives —sick with respiratory infections like the common cold and influenza.1

Common respiratory infections can lead to severe outcomes. In 2021 alone, there were 12.8 billion infections globally, mostly caused by viruses.2 Annually, over 65 million3 4 of these progress to serious lower respiratory disease and account for around 7% of deaths from major causes in the U.S. 5 6 7

Respiratory infections raise our risk of serious illness, often years later. While researchers are still early in establishing these connections, it seems plausible that society has meaningfully underestimated the significance of seemingly benign infections on short and long-term health, e.g.:<br>9.8x asthma risk by age 6 if infected with HRV between birth and age 3 in a high-risk cohort8

6.1x heart attack risk for 7 days after influenza infection9

4.5-5x dementia risk after severe influenza10

2.6-4.1x Alzheimer’s risk after severe influenza and pneumonia11

2.2-3x schizophrenia potential risk for infant if mother is infected by influenza during pregnancy12 13

1.3x risk of heart failure after RSV infection compared to influenza14

Routine respiratory illness imposes a massive, persistent economic burden, driving 1–1.5% annual productivity losses—roughly $600B globally, or ~0.6% of global GDP —in non-pandemic years.15

Emerging evidence suggests that severe prenatal16 17 and early postnatal18 respiratory infections might lead to reduced adult earnings and educational attainment later in life.

Achieving broad protection against respiratory pathogens would meaningfully reduce pandemic risk , serving as a critical first line of defense—alongside air disinfection—against both natural outbreaks and increasingly accessible engineered biological threats.

Two technologies, working together

No single technology can accomplish population-level infection reduction across all of these pathogens. A shot or pill that provided >90% protection against >90% of respiratory viruses (we’ll call these broad-spectrum preventatives or BSPs), but achieved ~60% uptake (a realistic ceiling based on existing vaccine uptake), would still fall short of of the population immunity required to dramatically reduce sustained transmissions.<br>This is because there are so many different kinds of respiratory viruses, many of which are highly contagious. It’s helpful to revisit the concept of R0 from the COVID pandemic: the number of people an infected person will infect in a fully unprotected population. While we can’t change the intrinsic R0 of a given virus, we can reduce any given virus’s...