Sustained Viral Resilience
Backed by £57m, this programme sits within the Programmable Physiology opportunity space and seeks to create a new class of medicines that provide durable, broad-spectrum protection against respiratory viruses by engineering the innate immune system.
Our goal
Today’s major viral threats are moving or unknown targets. Flu mutates every year, HIV is extremely genetically diverse, and the next pandemic virus is hard to predict. Vaccines dramatically reduced disease burden in the 20th century, but they fail to keep pace with the challenges today’s viruses present. To address this, we need a new class of medicines that can target viral infections with far greater precision, accuracy, and durability. That’s what this programme aims to unlock, by engineering the body’s innate immune system to create what we’re calling ‘sustained innate immunoprophylactics’ (SIIPs). SIIPs will provide durable, wide-ranging protection against respiratory viruses, opening an entirely new paradigm in our ability to combat viral disease.
Technical areas
This programme is split into three Technical Areas, each with its own distinct objective. We’re funding a diverse community of experts from fields including synthetic biology, systems immunology, materials chemistry, and AI to meet these goals.
Explorers
Focused on providing proof-of-concept evidence that sustained innate immunoprophylactics (SIIPs) are possible by designing, building, and testing candidates in in vitro and in vivo models.
Accelerators
Focused on developing tools, platforms, models, standards, or datasets in order to accelerate the process of bringing new SIIP candidates to strong proof-of-concept.
Translators
Focused on conducting research that facilitates the clinical translation and future commercialisation of SIIPs, ultimately smoothing the pathway from technical proof-of-concept to real-world impact.
Explore the funded projects
We're funding 11 teams made up of world-leading experts from a diverse range of fields, from synthetic biology to systems immunology, materials chemistry to machine learning. They’ll pursue multiple approaches to ‘sculpting’ the innate immune system in order to create sustained innate immunoprophylactics (SIIPs), and smooth their pathway to real-world impact.
Meet the programme team
Our Programme Directors are supported by a core team that provides a blend of operational coordination and highly specialised technical expertise.
Brian Wang
Brian co-founded the non-profit Panoplia Laboratories to pre-develop medicine for the next pandemic. Brian has a PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, conducted postdoctorate research in synthetic biology at MIT, and was Head of R&D at vaccine development start-up Alvea.
Agathe Parois
Before ARIA, Agathe led high-impact innovation programmes across the built environment and transport, accelerating the adoption of emerging technologies at scale. She brings deep expertise in shaping mission-led programmes, building strategic cross-sector partnerships and aligning senior stakeholders across industry, academia and government. Agathe supports ARIA as an Operating Partner from Pace.
Lawrence Billing
Lawrence joined ARIA from a startup background, which spanned the development of next-generation nucleic acid delivery platforms, immunomodulators, cancer vaccines, and cell-based immunotherapies. He holds a PhD in Clinical Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge.
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