The University of Washington MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness, a collaboration of scientific experts from 11 UW organizations, has announced today that the initiative will change its name and will be known as the UW Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness, effective immediately. The renaming reflects the evolution of the initiative and its vision for the future.

Co-Director Dr. Peter Rabinowitz said, “We are very excited about the introduction of our new name, the UW Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness, because it better reflects our inclusive approach to building a coalition of multiple and diverse partners locally and globally.”

Along with this change, a new website, www.pandemicalliance.org, has been launched. The website features the Alliance’s growing partnerships and expanding projects, including the daily COVID-19 Literature Situation Report and a searchable database of past reports. The initiative’s leadership and staff have not changed.

“In our global response to COVID-19 we see the limitations of our past approaches to pandemic threats: largely reactive, disjointed, outdated, and unable to adjust rapidly to changing conditions. There is an urgent need for new approaches to pandemic prevention and response that are more strategic, linked and proactive,” said Dr. Judy Wasserheit, Co-Director and Chair, UW Department of Global Health, “This work requires collaboration of scientists and experts across a very broad range of disciplines with the capacity to work across paradigms and link their findings.”

This is the gap that the UW Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness aims to fill. The Alliance aim is to develop and implement a proactive approach to pandemics that addresses the root causes of pandemic risk and accelerates effective action by working closely with partners in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) to achieve sustainable impact at large scale. The Alliance builds on the expertise and resource of UW’s scientific community and international partners, as well as the leadership role that the University has taken in response to COVID-19 at local, national and international levels.

The 11 UW partners that comprise the Alliance are: Center for Development and Deployment of Diagnostic Technologies for Low Resource Settings (CD3); Center for Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases (CERID); Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE); Center for One Health Research (COHR); Center for Innate Immunity and Immune Disease (CIIID); Global Medicines Program; International Center for Clinical Research (ICRC); International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH); Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME); Institute for Protein Design (IPD); and Washington National Primate Research Center (WANPRC). These UW Alliance members work closely with multiple international partners on five continents. Central to the Alliance, these international partners work together with Alliance members in equitable partnerships to co-develop, test and implement locally relevant strategies for prevention and control of pandemic diseases for the benefit of all.