Stripe, Anthropic and OpenAI fund 'Intercept', a nonprofit to eradicate the common cold and the flu

A new nonprofit organization called **Intercept** has been announced with the ambitious goal of preventing —and eventually eliminating— viral respiratory infections, including the common cold and the flu. The initiative has an initial endowment of **500 million dollars** and is led by the payments company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison. Alongside Stripe, funders also include **Anthropic**, the **OpenAI Foundation**, **Flu Lab**, **Bill Gates** and several operators of the quantitative investment fund Jane Street Capital.

Leading the initiative are **Nan Ransohoff**, a Stripe executive, and **Charlie Petty**, a venture capitalist who joined the company this year. Ransohoff argues that society has systematically underestimated the real burden of respiratory infections: according to her data, people spend on average **5% of their lives** fighting a cold or the flu, a burden that is rarely seen as a priority because these illnesses are perceived as «minor».

The underlying problem, according to its promoters, is structural: the enormous diversity of viruses that cause colds —more than 200 according to the American Lung Association, with rhinoviruses being the most common— makes it unprofitable for the pharmaceutical industry to develop a specific vaccine against each one of them. «When pharmaceutical companies analyze it, it's not as attractive as other areas they could work in», Ransohoff explains. The result is that the common cold has not attracted serious investment in prevention.

The conceptual idea behind Intercept emerged from conversations between Ransohoff and **David Veesler**, a structural biologist and vaccine designer at the University of Washington. Veesler convinced Ransohoff that it is technically feasible to develop **broad-spectrum countermeasures** capable of acting against multiple viruses at the same time, taking advantage of the modern scientific arsenal available: RNA drugs, antibodies and computational protein design. One of the ideas explored, for example, consists of engineering proteins able to «trap» viruses that people could apply as a nasal spray before infection occurs.

«Most people accept these viruses as an inevitable fact of life, and that led us to ask: do we have to accept it?», Veesler notes. «The more we thought about it, the more we realized that many of these problems had never been addressed with modern technologies.» The scientist acknowledges that viral diversity intimidates both researchers and funders, which perpetuates inertia: «The diversity of the viruses is so great and seems so intimidating that people don't even try».

Intercept will not limit itself to funding vaccine research. It will also support the development of **large-scale air purification systems** for schools, offices and other public spaces, using, for example, high-intensity ultraviolet light to inactivate viruses present in the environment. The analogy its promoters use is telling: just as municipalities treat water before distributing it to homes by removing impurities, the idea would be to «clean» the air we breathe in shared spaces to eliminate pathogens before they reach people.

The organization will operate through a combination of **grants and investments**, backing both foundational scientific approaches and more applied developments. Among its advisers are **Peter Marks**, a former senior US FDA official, and **Moncef Slaoui**, the pharmaceutical executive who led Operation Warp Speed, the accelerated development program for covid-19 vaccines in the United States.

The parallel with the covid-19 pandemic is explicit: it was precisely that crisis that demonstrated vaccines, antivirals and antibodies can be developed at unprecedented speed. Veesler himself took part in that effort. For Ransohoff, the cold and the flu present a challenge structurally similar to that of atmospheric carbon capture: both are «technically possible» but «lack commercial incentives» that would mobilize private industry on their own.

This is not the first time Stripe has spearheaded a large-scale philanthropic initiative in the scientific-technological field. The company previously organized **Frontier**, a 1.8 billion dollar program aimed at fostering the development of atmospheric carbon removal technologies. The Collison brothers were also among the donors who contributed **650 million dollars** to create the **Arc Institute** in Palo Alto (California), a research center that has developed artificial intelligence models for biology. During the covid-19 pandemic, they also drove the so-called «fast grants», agile aid for laboratories that needed urgent funding.

The institutional context is also relevant: the US **National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)** invests approximately **6.5 billion dollars annually** in virus research, but its budget has gone years without growing in real terms. That stagnation of public funding opens up growing space for private, science-oriented philanthropy, which initiatives like Intercept seek to seize.

In sum, Intercept represents a singular bet: bringing to the fight against the common cold and the flu the same «impossible mission that becomes possible» mindset that characterized the response to covid-19, combining cutting-edge biotechnological tools, environmental technology and a funding model that does not depend on short-term commercial profitability. If the initiative succeeds, it could redefine the way humanity lives —or stops living— with the planet's most ubiquitous respiratory viruses.