The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent the early 2010s constructing what may have been the most ambitious predictive vaccine-development infrastructure ever attempted: a sprawling, multi-institution effort designed to determine the future characteristics of purported pathogens before they emerged and ultimately use those predictions to develop drugs and vaccines before they were needed.

The program, known as PROPHECY—short for Pathogen Defeat—was announced in 2010 under Broad Agency Announcement DARPA-BAA-10-93 and was managed by DARPA's Defense Sciences Office.

DARPA itself described the vaccine-centric purpose of the program unambiguously.

According to the agency: "The Prophecy (Pathogen Defeat) program will explore the evolution of viruses in the hopes of predicting viral mutations and ultimately developing drugs and vaccines in advance of need."

The effort was not limited to coronaviruses, influenza, or any other single disease category.

DARPA repeatedly stated that the goal was understanding: "the natural evolution of any virus."

The result was a massive architecture that brought together machine learning researchers, statisticians, bioinformaticians, computational biologists, laboratory scientists, surveillance specialists, universities, contractors, and national laboratories into a single "predictive" framework.

Yesterday, this website reported that DARPA's PROPHECY program expanded into the laboratory of coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric years before the COVID-19 pandemic and nearly a decade before the DARPA/DEFUSE proposal documented all three defining structural features of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein prior to the outbreak.

DARPA Wanted to Turn Vaccine Development from Reactive to Predictive

DARPA openly believed that existing vaccine development operated backwards.

The agency described the modern pharmaceutical model as: "observational and reactive."

PROPHECY was intended to replace that model with one that was: "predictive and preemptive."

Rather than waiting for future purported disease threats to appear before beginning the process of characterization and countermeasure development, DARPA sought systems capable of determining the characteristics of future pathogen populations in advance.

Everything in PROPHECY flowed from that objective.

Building the Blueprint Before the Pathogen

DARPA's ambitions extended far beyond outbreak forecasting.

The agency stated: "DARPA seeks to achieve the ability to successfully predict the natural evolution of any virus, via platforms and algorithms which are capable of monitoring rare advantageous viral events…"