On January 4, 2018 DARPA announces their new 3.5-year “program called Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT, seeks to support military readiness by going after new viral infectious diseases at the source, animal reservoirs—the species in which a pathogen lives, multiplies, and potentially evolves into a strain that can threaten humans.”
In February 2019 DARPA announced their partnership with 5 companies who are developing new generation countermeasure platforms, includes Autonomous Therapeutics who has as self-spreading vaccine conceived in 2014 and accelerating in 2024. [1, 2]
Promoted as a “New Layer of Medical Preparedness to Combat Emerging Infectious Disease” where industry research “supporting PREEMPT program will model viral evolution in animal populations, quantify the probability of human pathogen emergence, and pursue proof-of-concept interventions to prevent viral spread to humans”.