Stripe, Anthropic and OpenAI are backing an effort to stop respiratory infections

The common cold comes for us all—often more than once a year. And there is no way to prevent it. The best you can do is take vitamin C and stay away from people with the sniffles. Now, the payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new $500-million nonprofit whose goal is preventing both the common cold and the flu. Its eventual aim is to get rid of respiratory viruses altogether. The new organization, called Intercept, will use grants and investments to back prevention approaches, including vaccines, as well as large-scale air-cleaning systems for schools, offices, and other public spaces. In addition to Stripe, other funders include Anthropic, Flu Lab, the OpenAI Foundation, as well as Bill Gates and several traders at the quantitative investing fund Jane Street Capital, according to an Intercept spokesperson. “I think we treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but have really underweighted the burden that they impose on society,” says Nan Ransohoff, the Stripe executive leading the initiative along with Charlie Petty, a venture capitalist who joined Stripe this year. The average person will spend 5% of their lifetime fighting a cold or the flu, according to Ransohoff. Despite that, drug companies put relatively little effort into preventing colds. Part of the problem is that the sniffles are caused by more than 200 different viruses, according to the American Lung Association, with rhinoviruses being the most common culprits. There are so many that it typically doesn’t pay to try to stop any one of them with a vaccine. “When pharma companies look at it, it’s not as attractive as other things they could work on,” says Ransohoff. “So it hasn’t attracted the resources.” Stripe previously organized a $1.8 billion program called Frontier to encourage the development of carbon removal technology, as a way of countering climate change. Ransohoff says removing carbon from the atmosphere and getting rid of respirat