A new US$500 million nonprofit called Intercept is taking aim at one of medicine’s most neglected problems: the common cold. Backed by Stripe, Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation, Bill Gates, Flu Lab, and Jane Street Capital traders, the initiative aims to prevent and eventually eliminate all respiratory viruses.
“On average, people spend 5 percent of their lifetime fighting a cold or the flu,” said Nan Ransohoff, head of climate and strategic projects at Stripe, who will serve as an executive at Intercept. “We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but have really underweighted the burden that they impose on society.”
The organization is led by Ransohoff and venture capitalist Charlie Petty, with scientific direction from David Veesler, a structural biologist at the University of Washington whose group helped develop vaccines, antivirals, and antibodies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Advisors include former FDA official Peter Marks and Moncef Slaoui, who led Operation Warp Speed.
Intercept will use grants and investments to pursue multiple approaches simultaneously: broad-spectrum vaccines that target multiple virus types, large-scale air-cleaning systems using ultraviolet light to inactivate viruses in public spaces, engineered virus-grabbing proteins for nasal sprays designed to catch viruses before they cause infection, and RNA drugs, antibodies, and computational protein design.
Over 200 different viruses cause colds, most commonly rhinoviruses. The diversity makes traditional vaccine development commercially unattractive, a classic incentive problem that Intercept’s philanthropic model aims to solve.
“When pharma companies look at it, it’s not as attractive as other things they could work on,” Ransohoff said.
The initiative draws on a model Stripe pioneered with Frontier, the US$1.8 billion carbon removal program Ransohoff also helped lead. “Both problems are technically possible,” she said, “but lack commercial incentives.”
The Collison brothers, Stripe’s co-founders, have a track record in this space, they funded “Fast Grants” during the pandemic and later co-funded the Arc Institute, a US$650 million effort applying AI to biology.
“I’m happy that someone is ready to help scientists, not accepting the status quo, and doing something different,” Veesler said.
Sources: Stripe, Anthropic and OpenAI are backing an effort to stop respiratory infections (MIT Technology Review, June 24, 2026)