New virus prediction technology aims to prevent future epidemics

To prevent future epidemics, Premonition uses smart remote sensing and virus prediction technology to track dangerous pathogens.

“What’s the weather like outside?” It’s a simple question, that we don’t think twice about. Our smart assistants, phones or a simple internet search can answer it.

But it actually takes a global sensor network of weather stations, advanced data analytics and modern supercomputers to make these predictions.

Microsoft’s new Premonition smart remote sensing technology envisions doing the same for predicting the distribution and evolution of microbes, viruses and disease-carrying animals in the Earth’s biome, or the life around us. If the biome could be monitored like the weather, environmental pathogens might be detected earlier and outbreaks predicted before they cause large epidemics.

Today, more than ever, new global sensor networks are needed to protect our health, and the health of our economies and societies.

“Microsoft Premonition changes the paradigm from reacting to known pathogens to continuously looking for them as they evolve,” says Ethan Jackson, senior director of Microsoft Premonition. “These signals could help us spot potential threats earlier, respond faster and develop new interventions before outbreaks occur.”

Microsoft Premonition is an advanced early warning system that combines robotic sensing platforms, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and cloud-scale metagenomics to autonomously monitor disease-carrying animals such as mosquitoes, robotically collect environmental samples, and then genomically scan them for biological threats.

Like weather prediction, its analytics pipelines uses cloud-scale computing, leveraging the latest advancements in Azure IoT and Azure Data Lake on Microsoft Azure. Today, Premonition’s pipelines have scanned more than 80 trillion base-pairs of genomic material from environmental samples for biological threats.

Newly announced is Microsoft Premonition Cloud, which uses Microsoft Azure for aggregating and analyzing data that is collected by Microsoft Premonition, and will be available in coming weeks through an Early Access Program.

Virus prediction technology for Zika, COVID & more

An estimated 60% to 75% of emerging infectious diseases are caused by pathogens that jump from animals to people. This includes viruses like Zika, West Nile, dengue and most recently, COVID-19.

By the time Zika emerged in 2016 in the Americas, the team had been researching new monitoring approaches for about a year. They quickly produced a small fleet of prototypes. These early robotic smart traps, resembling scale models of circular, high rise condos, were designed to lure, autonomously identify and capture mosquitoes, providing public health officials with data streams that weren’t previously available. The goal was to help them decide when and where disease-transmitting mosquitoes will be.

Harris County, home to the city of Houston, Texas, was the location for the initial deployment of Project Premonition, which has now matured into Microsoft Premonition. Fast-forward four years, and now Microsoft Premonition and Harris County Public Health will begin building one of the most advanced biothreat detection networks in an expanded partnership.

“Game-changing,” is how Douglas E. Norris, an entomologist and Johns Hopkins University professor of molecular microbiology and immunology, describes Premonition’s impact.

“Everything we do now in terms of mosquito treatment is reactive – we see a lot of mosquitoes, we go spray a lot of mosquitoes,” says Norris, who worked on the project.

“Imagine if you had a forecasting system that shows, in a few days you’re going to have a lot of mosquitoes based on all this data and these models — then you could go out and treat them earlier before they’re biting, spray, hit them early so you don’t get those big mosquito blooms which then might result in disease transmission.”

It is a healthier approach for humans and for the environment, Norris says. And it’s also a more cost-effective approach, especially with COVID-19 stressing the staffing and budget limits of public health departments around the world.

Houston, we have a solution

Building on the idea of One-Health, a concept that reinforces the idea that the health of the humans depends on the environment they live in, Premonition aids public health systems to better measure the efficacy of interventions and the costs of varying approaches.

“Most of the things that can impact our health, the health of our societies and our economies are small,” says Jackson. “They’re things like arthropods — such as mosquitoes and ticks, or microbes and viruses that are even smaller; they are at the scales of millimeters, microns and nanometers.”

Microsoft Premonition’s robotic sensing platform will capture, collect, aggregate and analyze data about these tiny and often seemingly unseen threats.

“All of the sensor networks that we have today — networks that do things like collect data to predict weather, collect data about the power grid so that we can load balance it, collect information about what traffic is doing so that we can predict it — all of those sensor networks, which are really hundreds and hundreds of millions of sensors — can’t see these important species,” Jackson says.

“These life forms we’re talking about are invisible to basically all of those sensors that we’ve deployed across the globe. And that’s pretty incredible when you think about it, that we have such a huge blind spot about what’s in the environment.”

In 2016, during the peak risk of Zika transmission, 10 robotic smart traps were trained in Harris County to identify and selectively capture relevant mosquitoes and did so with about 90% accuracy. In addition, metagenomic analyses detected microorganisms and viruses in mosquito specimens, and identified the types of animals on which they fed.

Now, with the upcoming deployment of Microsoft Premonition, Harris County will have a sensor network at scale, providing “continuous biological situational awareness,” Jackson says. “So, they should be able to look at a map and see in real time what is happening now. Which, from the weather analogy, just doesn’t exist today. A 24-hour forecast allows them to plan early for specific interventions in the environment.”

Steps toward a safer future

“We want a future where emerging pathogens like Zika can be detected and suppressed quickly and equitably across Harris County,” says Dr. Umair Shah, executive director of Harris County Public Health. “This partnership will also evaluate new genomic capabilities to detect known and emerging pathogens from environmental samples — which we now know is especially important for diseases like COVID-19.”

The next step is to be able to forecast “when and where the threat might emerge, not just 24 hours from now, but say, a month from now,” Jackson says. “And to do that, we’ll be refactoring, redesigning epidemiological models so that we can tell Harris County – ‘This is a location a month from now where there is a high possibility of an outbreak of West Nile virus,’” the primary mosquito-borne virus in Harris County.

Over the last five years, Premonition’s technologies have been tested in a variety of habitats — ranging from the sands of the Florida Keys to the remote forests of Tanzania, Africa. “Biology is hard, and we want to do it right,” Jackson says. Science can’t be rushed.

Continue this story here on Microsoft’s news blog.

Learn more about Premonition here, or check out the video below about Premonition’s pathogens and virus prediction technology: