On May 13, 2020, the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR), a multi-institutional initiative convened by Harvard Medical School to combat the disease and prepare for future outbreaks, announced over $16.5 million in funding to support 62 high-impact research projects.

The consortium is a collaborative effort that includes scientists and clinicians from Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Tufts University, University of Massachusetts and local biomedical research institutes, biotech companies and academic medical centers.

Projects were selected in this initial round of funding for their potential to influence clinical outcomes in patients and populations within the next 12 months. They are organized around the consortium’s primary scientific and clinical focus areas: the development of vaccines, therapies and diagnostic tools, clinical management, epidemiology and understanding how SARS-CoV-2 causes disease.

MassCPR’s mission is to address the myriad challenges of the current pandemic and the need for enhanced preparedness for future ones.

The consortium now involves hundreds of researchers, physician-scientists, frontline clinicians, epidemiologists and more, representing world-leading academic, hospital, biopharma and public-health institutions based in Massachusetts. They are joined by collaborators at the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health and Tsinghua University in China.