PREDICT, the surveillance and virus discovery component of the Emerging Pandemic Threats program

The PREDICT project is a part of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program lead by the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine in a consortium with EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota, Smithsonian Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society; focusing on pathogen surveillance, viral discovery and global health capacity strengthening in more than 20 countries. USAID initiated the Emerging Pandemic Threats program in 2009 with the goal of strengthening capacities in developing countries to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases. PREDICT, the surveillance and virus discovery component of the EPT program, focuses on building capacity to identify potential zoonotic viral threats at high-risk wildlife-human pathogen transmission interfaces where diseases are most likely to emerge. The goal is to discover potentially pathogenic viruses before they emerge from animals into people, and surveillance efforts are focused on wildlife and domestic animals most likely to serve as reservoirs for emerging zoonotic viruses (such bats, rodents, and nonhuman primates), and people, at human-animal interfaces with high-risk potential for disease transmission. By conducting global surveillance the project hopes to detect and prevent spillover of pathogens of pandemic potential that can move between animals and people. Virus detection across high-risk interfaces for PREDICT was performed using a combination of consensus polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and high through-put sequencing (HTS).