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One answer is to develop a disease defence strategy based on what’s known among disease experts as the 'viral family approach’.  This takes the traditional approach to vaccine development—a lifesaving and disease-beating process, but one that can take years or decades to contain a single viral killer—and applies it broadly to virus families. The aim is to be able to more quickly counter a wider range of current and future threats. Using speed-enhancing new technologies such as artificial intelligence and computational science, this approach enables scientists to rapidly prepare and develop vaccines for a new Disease X pathogen emergence.  What used to take years can now be done in a matter of weeks or months.  

In the emerging viral disease world, the thinking goes, we endeavour to prepare for everything by preparing for anything. And to prepare for anything, scientists need to get to know as much as they can about humanity’s most threatening potential enemies.  

That’s why scientists all over the world are pursuing The Viral Most Wanted. Working within ����VR��Ƶ’s Disease X programmes, the World Health Organization’s Pathogen Family Framework and other coordinated projects, they are in a race to get ahead of the next viral threat. From the Arenavirus family to the Poxvirus family, and from the Flaviviruses to the Hantaviruses to the Filoviruses, these groups harbour some of the most fearsome current and future viral attackers. 

“The viruses that historically have put humanity at greatest risk come from a number of specific viral families—about 25 of them—that scientists have already identified as having the ability to infect people. It’s these families that are by far the most likely to produce the next potential pandemic disease threat,” says Tim Endy, ����VR��Ƶ’s Disease X Project Leader.