Leaders of a groundbreaking pandemic prevention project say a $100 million grant will greatly expand their work to curb disease outbreaks.
“The event that doesn’t exist – that is the proof our system is working,” said Dolo Nosamiefan, project manager for Sentinel, a collaboration between the Cambridge-based Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Institute of Genomics and Global Health (IGH) in Nigeria. Sentinel is co-directed by the Broad Institute’s Pardis C. Sabeti and IGH cofounder Christian T. Happi.
The Sentinel project in November won the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change award, gaining $100 million paid over five years. Sentinel aims to help countries like Nigeria and Sierra Leone prevent infectious disease outbreaks in low-resource areas by empowering communities and implementing surveillance frameworks for detection. Adding local capacity and know-how in these regions adds to the impact, and in particular responding more rapidly to disease incidents.
“We’re treating very local problems, but these problems can have global impacts … A lot of these diseases, if you don’t handle it quickly enough or in the right places, they have the potential to grow into a pandemic,” said Nosamiefan.
Al Ozonoff, director of pandemic preparedness at the Broad Institute, was Sentinel’s director of U.S. operations when it started in 2020 and will now become the managing director in phase two of the program, which begins next year. This second phase, funded by the MacArthur award, will help the project deepen its networks in Nigeria and Sierra Leone and expand into other countries in West and Central Africa.
“The origins of Sentinel came from a deep, deep commitment to empower local communities that are most affected by outbreaks,” Ozonoff said, “so that they have the tools, the training and the technology that’s needed to provide their own response, rather than depending on others.”
The Sentinel system aims to help countries like Nigeria and Sierra Leone prevent infectious disease outbreaks in low-resource areas by empowering communities and implementing surveillance frameworks for detection.
The project uses a hub-and-spoke model. Each country that uses Sentinel has a single hub for high-level analysis, including genome sequencing of samples. Various spokes extend throughout the countries to perform rapid testing and send samples to the hub. These tests can help inform leaders where and how quickly a virus has spread. Right now, Nigeria has four spokes and Sierra Leone has three spokes. The next phase will introduce more spokes into these areas to help them become more prepared for outbreaks.
“We’ve chosen some of these locations based on previous trends that we’ve observed in these countries,” said Nosamiefan. “However, emerging diseases don’t follow previous trends. We want to be better positioned in these countries to more effectively catch everything.”
Colby Wilkason, program manager for Sentinel at the Broad Institute, said the project also works to develop new technologies to expand surveillance efficiency while ensuring these technologies work well with their country partners’ labs.
“We create the technologies here, but then we also work very carefully and closely with our partners to make sure the technologies actually work in the country as well,” she said. “We are there to support our country partners, because that’s where the meat of the work is happening.”
This is the third time the 100&Change award has been given out, with its inaugural round in 2017, and its second in 2021. The competition is open to organizations anywhere in the world and within any field, as long as proposals must identify a “real and measurable” solution to a current issue.
Chris Cardona, managing director, discovery, exploration and programs at the MacArthur Foundation, said the 18-month selection process started in May 2024 with 869 valid applications. In April 2025 MacArthur chose five finalists that included a range of projects offering solutions to urgent problems like corruption, misinformation, education and global health, Cardona said.
“The quality of the applications was really, really high,” he said. “It was a difficult choice for the board. All of them are worthy and would use the funds well.”
Sentinel will receive the award in installments throughout the five years and report its progress annually.
Ozonoff said winning the grant was the “biggest thing” he has done in his career and felt deep gratitude with the recognition. “We care deeply about the work,” he said. “We think that it’s important. It meant the world to us to be acknowledged in this way. We’re always thinking about how much good this can do in the communities where we work… The whole point of this is to make a real difference.”
This story is part of a partnership between Cambridge Day and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
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