Consulting the Experts

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Dr. Gady Agam is a Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Dr. Agam provided us with valuable insight and guidance towards our project; in particular, he advised us that a bidirectional RNN could help us solve the problem of gaining information from the entire sequence.

Dr. Michael Burgess is Professor in the research Chair in Biomedical Ethics at the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics, within the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. He is also Associate Provost, Strategy on the Okanagan campus. We spoke with Dr. Burgess to gain insight on the feasibility of our project and ethical challenges that we may face. He also provided valuable input on long-term implications of the pandemic. Some of the topics we discussed with Dr. Burgess that have informed our project vision are:

• Possible impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on pandemic preparation plans, policy-making, and investment in medical technology
• Ethical concerns surrounding bio-bank use and data collection 
• Liability considerations of our project, including misuse of the tool and likelihood of resources wasted on vaccine development for false positives
• Use of public deliberations to inform policies and practice in life sciences: gathering members of the public from diverse backgrounds to discuss questions such as mandatory vaccination to reaching a consensus
• Inequities in the harm distributed by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading us to consider how VPRE may help vaccine distribution in less developed countries and marginalized communities

Dr. Beltrán is an economics professor based in Lima, Peru whose research is focused on poverty analysis and economic development. She is Vice President of research and former Dean of the School of Economics in Universidad del Pacífico (University of the Pacific) in Lima. Since our tool's implementation is aimed to be worldwide and to various socioeconomics statuses, we thought her experience could provide insight on VPRE's future in developing countries. Much of our discussion is based on the future society we envision VPRE would be implemented in, which can be explored here. The main takeaways from our interview are summarized below:

• Strict requirements and regulations surrounding medical technology in developing countries makes the idea of livestock gene sequencing difficult.
• The majority of businesses are usually informal (not registered with the government), hence agricultural monitoring would be hindered for healthcare workers carrying out sequencing. A possible remediation for this would be to make sequencing kits so farm workers themselves can carry this out instead of relying on healthcare workers.
• Investment in medical technology depends on the country's government, which in developing countries is often corrupt and therefore allocates funds to other endeavours.
• Many developing countries have vaccination programs already in place for distribution to rural areas, so adding RNA vaccines to these programs could be straightforward.

We had the wonderful opportunity to speak with an expert in epidemiology, who wishes to remain anonymous. The discussion revolved around the topics of where our software fits in vaccine development, current pandemic disease preparedness, and the potential threat of zoonotic viruses. A few of the main takeaways from our conversation are summarized below:

• The risk of zoonotic viruses “jumping” from one host to another poses a risk to humanity. Initially, this may kill a lot of the new hosts. However, the virus may attenuate over time to avoid killing the host, so as to maintain its own survival. Thus, we cannot safely assume that a virus becomes more “fit” over time. 
• In terms of the current COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of candidates for vaccines are already going into clinical trials. Thus, our project could be useful in either 1) monitoring the mutation of the current vaccine into something no longer useful, or 2) predicting the next pandemic, given that we are able generalize our platform beyond corona viruses. 
• In terms of preparing for pandemics, the key is to recognize the problem early, recruit a large public health workforce, credible leadership, and research capabilities.