PICANTE builds and coordinates transdisciplinary expertise in the documentation, monitoring, and mitigation of emerging and re-emerging pathogens that threaten human and wildlife health, food security, ecosystem function, and, ultimately, national and global economic and social stability.
PICANTE will develop transformative resources and models for integrating the vast network of specimens and information from biorepositories, revealing new proactive pathways for anticipation and mitigation of emergent pathogens and disease. PICANTE will create a nexus across pathobiology, in building human capacity, comprehensive biodiversity infrastructure, associated sample and informatics pipelines, and transboundary investigations in ecology and evolution as an unprecedented foundation for emerging disease research and training.
PICANTE views biodiversity as the bedrock of human health, within the complex evolutionary and ecological dynamics in our biosphere. Healthy communities cannot exist without a flourishing biodiversity and informatics resources that provide clear insights into the circulation of pathogens, while concurrently supporting maintenance of secure food and resilient ecosystems and discovery of new medicines. Our strength is in institutional diversity- in building a diffuse and differentiated network of cooperating biorepositories and experts, who will co-develop concepts and protocols and train local scientists to conduct biodiversity-driven pathogen research that matters to each local community. Fundamentally, biodiversity-driven programs for pandemic preparedness must be scalable from landscapes to regions, emphasizing networks of local groups, each focusing on the risk of circulating pathogens that threaten public and economic health.
This work has been partially supported by the National Science Foundation PIPP Phase I award [grant number 2155222, PI Joseph Cook] and is only possible from the extensive efforts of field crews and museum scientists at the Instituto Conmemorativo Gorgas de Estudios de la Salud (Panama City, Panama), Museum of Southwestern Biology (Albuquerque, New Mexico), and Colección de Flora y Fauna Profesor Patricio Sánchez Reyes at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago, Chile) who collected and preserved archival tissues of the rodents. You can find more information at http://www.msb.unm.edu/research/emerging-pathogens-and-zoonotics/picante/index.html