In his bestselling book, Premonition, Michael Lewis tracked the highs and lows of a cast of “scientific misfits” who foresaw the pandemic long before it hit, but were unable to avert a bungled, chaotic response in the United States.
Dr Charity Dean, who began 2020 as California’s deputy public health officer, emerged as a central protaganist. Within days of hearing about a mystery virus spreading from Wuhan, she was obsessively tracking snippets of information from news reports, medical journals and Twitter.
Within months, Dr Dean had joined forces with a small group who’s discarded disease strategies, back of the envelope epidemiology and unheeded warnings form the basis of Premonition.
For Dr Dean, the pandemic cemented a mounting sense that government was ill-equipped to tackle disease outbreaks – too slow, too bureaucratic, and too chaotic. So in June 2020, she quit her job, formed the Public Health Company (PHC) and turned to Silicon Valley.
Her new goal? To build a biosecurity platform that tracks the spread of infectious diseases in real-time, forecasts an outbreak’s trajectory, and offers public health advice which companies can use to inform their risk assessments.
In other words, to turn the way the “scientific misfits” thought into an intelligence software that could save businesses billions. And so far, the PHC has raised $43 million to turn that into reality.
“This is not an academic exercise,” Dr Dean told the Telegraph. “Our goal is to be fast and directionally correct… by the time you’re academically correct, you’ve waited too long. We’ve seen that with the US CDC [the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention] over and over.
“Business leaders need a real snapshot of what’s happening today underneath the surface, a forecast based on that, then practical recommendations based on their business. Not broad and general, but tailored to the industry they’re in, so they can protect their employees, supply chains and profits,” she added.
‘Government can’t build this, Silicon Valley can’
Such a platform is urgently required, Dr Dean said, because the world has entered a “new reality”. Trends including globalisation, booming population growth, a surge in international travel and human encroachment into jungles and forest means it is increasingly likely that viruses will “spill over” to humans and lap the globe.
“But what we have learned over the last year and a half… is that enterprises have not had any solutions to [ensure] their business continuity or economic security in light of this changing world,” she said.
“I see viruses very much like a machine, and yet we’re trying to beat a machine with these manual processes,” Dr Dean added, pointing out the heavy reliance on fax machines within the United States’ public health system.
It wasn’t just her frustrations at a paper based system that drove Dr Dean to leave government. Modelling and analysis of data was slow, efforts to secure Covid tests haphazard and the norm was to downplay the situation, especially in the early days. In January 2020, she was told by her boss to stop “scaring people” when she raised concerns about the coronavirus in Wuhan, and was then cut out of response meetings.
“I concluded that government can’t build this technology driven solution, but Silicon Valley can,” Dr Dean said.
Now, her alternative venture has captured the imagination of California’s tech hub.
In April 2021, the PHC raised $8 million of seed funding from investors including the venture capital firm Venrock and Alphabet’s life sciences branch, Verily. In a series A investment fundraising round that concluded last week, the company attracted a further $35m.
“We’ve had more interest than we thought we would,” said Dr Dean, speaking over Zoom from the compact home office built behind her garage, where the walls are covered in post-it notes, design ideas scrawled over whiteboards and Star Wars posters.
“It’s a real vote of confidence in what we’re building that, in this economic time when all startups are having a hard time raising [funds]... we’ve actually ended up raising more than we set out to,” she added.
But Dr Dean and the PHC’s president, Ali Tore, are coy about which businesses have so far bought into the idea, revealing only that “very large global enterprises are onboard as our founding customers”.
“Their interest in the product is to be able to have a real-time God view of what their risk is and where, and then the ability to manage that risk,” she said. “All of our early customers are not only driven by economic security, but by a recognition that biosecurity risk is the new reality. And they’re accountable to their boards, to their audit committees, to their staff.”
The company now employs 45 people, and advisers including the renowned biochemist Prof Joe DeRisi and Dr Carter Mecher, who wrote the US Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan. Both are central figures in Premonition.
In the early stages, the company is focusing on creating a tool for technology and finance industries. The first version of the software – called PHC Pharos after the lighthouse that once stood outside Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world – should be live within the next two months, pending design tweaks.
Version one will cover 18 countries – including the UK, Malaysia, China and India – chosen because of their relevance to the companies on board. The early software will track what viruses are doing, but also how governments are responding and the overall risk for business.
The aim is to gradually expand. PHC Pharos will cover a growing number of countries and industries, including working with regional and national governments within three to five years. Eventually, with the help of artificial intelligence, it will be a predominantly automated system.
“Right now there’s a lot of human experts involved in building the software,” said Dr Dean. “My goal is that the software displaces me over time… so that it scales globally. Although it will be a long journey.”
But Dr Dean is not afraid of the challenge.
“Coming from the perspective of a local health officer and a state health officer, my view is that CEOs are exactly the same,” she added. “They’ve realised no one is coming to save them. No tools exist. And that they own the risk. They have to make high risk decisions based on imperfect data really fast, and they’re the ones that are accountable to their thousands of employees to their board of directors.
“I thought I’d be in government for the rest of my career… but I couldn’t stand it if this platform didn’t exist.”
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