In March 2023, SPARK Stanford and AiBST partnered to launch SPARK Africa to promote translational science among academicians at African institutions. At the meeting Prof. Daria Mochly-Rosen presented a talk on ‘Egg-derived Anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoglobin Y (IgY) with broad variant activity as intranasal prophylaxis against COVID-19 as an affordable IgY-based antiviral prophylaxis for resource-limited settings to address epidemic and pandemic risks (Chen et al., 2022). The presentation emphatically demonstrated the power of the SPARK model of  ‘designing with the end in mind’. This captured the Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education in Zimbabwe who was the guest of honour at the conference who immediately asked AiBST and Spark at Standford to present a model of collaboration that would enable transfer of this technology to Zimbabwe. Since that time, Daria has been sharing some material on the project and ideas of how we could proceed with this ‘challenge’ from the minister. She was also reaching out to former team members of the project and other organisations to see how they could best help us. SPARK Global has approved the funding of this  pilot to transfer this technology to AiBST in Zimbabwe. Successfully doing that will then be followed by engaging the government of Zimbabwe for scaling up the platform through a commercial vehicle involving all concerned parties. 

 

Underlying technology 

Frumkin LR, et al. (2022a) have successfully implemented the production of IgY with activity as intranasal prophylaxis against COVID-19 (Fig 1). Several studies have since went on to demonstrate efficacy of the IgY produced using the same approach in murine models (Agurto-Arteaga et al., 2022; El-Kafrawy et al., 2022; Wongso et al;, 2022; Yeh et al., 2022)