Future Perfect 25: 6 activists and organizers want to change global health’s trust problem

The grand challenges of global health and development, from feeding a warming world to defeating antibiotic resistance, require funding and effort and politics. But they also require breakthroughs.

In the last hundred years, we’ve made incredible progress fighting malaria, invented game-changing vaccines, and developed new drugs that could change the course on heart disease. But that doesn’t mean we should be satisfied. There’s still plenty of work to be done, and it’s all the more important in light of the worldwide retreat of foreign aid.
This year’s class of innovators are the scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs who understand that real progress demands radical new tools. They’re engineering microbes to clean up pollution, resurrecting ancient antibiotics with the help of AI, and building entirely new platforms for vaccine production in the Global South.

Their work is a vibrant proof point: the future of human well-being, the fight against pandemic threats, and the resilience of our food supply all depend on the creative, sometimes audacious, power of innovation. —Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor

Every 15 minutes, one person in the US dies because of an infection that antibiotics can no longer treat effectively. If you ever get an antibiotic-resistant infection, it could be César de la Fuente’s research that ends up saving your life.

De la Fuente heads a lab at the University of Pennsylvania called the Machine Biology Group, which is helping to pioneer the field of AI-based antibiotic discovery. His team developed the first computer-designed antibiotic with proven efficacy in preclinical animal models.

You can thank this team for launching us into the brave new world of “molecular de-extinction”: In 2023, they resurrected molecules with antibiotic properties found in extinct organisms — Neanderthals. After training an AI model to make predictions about which molecules might make effective antibiotics for our modern age, they created those molecules in the lab and tested them in infected mice, with promising results.

Emboldened by this success, de la Fuente asked: “Why not just mine every extinct organism known to science?” To do that, the team developed a more powerful AI model called APEX, which they unveiled earlier this year. Already, it’s allowed them to identify new molecules in everything from ancient penguins to magnolia trees that had long since disappeared.

This work is very cool — and very urgent. By 2050, 10 million people could die each year from diseases that have grown resistant to drugs. Yet Big Pharma lacks the financial incentive to create new antibiotics. That makes the creative research of scientists like de la Fuente incredibly valuable. —Sigal Samuel, senior reporter

On a sun-baked morning in central Kenya, a small solar-powered device blinks to life beside a row of bean plants. It scans the leaves with a tiny camera, searching for the first signs of disease — the faint spots that might spell disaster for a farmer’s season. The machine was built by Esther Wanjiru Kimani, a computer scientist who believes technology’s most meaningful frontier isn’t in Silicon Valley. It’s in the fields where food begins.

Kimani grew up in Tigoni, a rural and mountainous village in Kenya, watching her parents battle unpredictable harvests. Each year, pests and blights crept through their crops faster than they could react. Years later, after she earned a degree in computer science from the University of Eldoret, northwest of Nairobi, she founded Farmer Lifeline Technologies, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to help smallholder farmers detect pests and diseases before they spread.

Her device, affordable and solar-powered, takes images of crops and then analyzes them in real time with machine-learning models. If the scan detects something amiss, it sends early-warning texts to farmers’ phones.

It’s a simple system, but it could have profound implications in her home country and beyond: fewer chemical sprays, healthier yields, and more resilient livelihoods. In field trials, farmers using her technology have reduced crop losses by up to 30 percent and seen yield gains of roughly 40 percent — a game-changer in regions where even small fluctuations can decide whether a family has enough money to survive.

Kimani’s work has earned global attention. In 2024, she won the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, becoming one of the few women — and one of the youngest — to ever receive the honor. I find her so inspiring because what her work embodies feels both humble and radical — and breaks the form of what you’d normally hear in the AI startup space.

Her technology is an act of care. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor

Few scientists have done more to turn India’s vaccine ambition into a working system than Gagandeep Kang.

Kang is known for her critical role in advancing vaccines such as the one against rotavirus, a gut virus responsible for deadly bouts of diarrhea in young children. But Kang’s impact runs deeper than any single shot: She helped build the evidence, trial capacity, and translational systems that move vaccines in India from lab bench to bedside.

Kang began her career in the late 1980s as a microbiologist at the Christian Medical College in India, tracking the gut viruses that were hospitalizing hundreds of thousands of children and killing over 100,000 a year. Her early work on diarrheal diseases and rotavirus laid the groundwork for India’s vaccine research, then still in its infancy. In 2018, the World Health Organization approved Rotovac for global use — the first Indian-developed vaccine to meet international quality standards. A year later, India rolled it out nationwide, marking a turning point against one of its deadliest childhood infections. Today, Rotavac is used in several countries, including Ghana and Palestine, where it’s part of national immunization programs.

Kang has advised governments and the WHO, pushed for stronger ethics boards and transparent data, and led India’s Translational Health Science and Technology Institute to build clinical trial capacity from the ground up. In short, she brought order and rigor to India’s clinical research. During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, she became India’s clearest public voice on tackling misinformation — she was measured, data-driven, and unwilling to trade science for politics.

In early January 2021, when India’s regulator approved the home-grown Covid-19 shot Covaxin before publishing results from its final round of testing, Kang publicly warned against the move: “Essentially, you are handing people who are anti-vaccine, anti-science, a weapon that they can use,” she told the Times of India.

Now at the Gates Foundation, Kang oversees global work on enteric infections, diagnostics, and genomics — the unsexy, but critical, plumbing in public health. Kang has spent her career proving that trust and transparency are as vital to public health as the vaccines themselves. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

Synthetic biology is a field that redesigns life itself — engineering organisms to have new abilities. Already, we can harness microbes to clean up the environment or create sustainable fuels, and it’s only just the beginning.

The field has exploded in the past few decades around the world, but it’s been slower to catch on in Africa. Geoffrey Otim wants to change that.

Otim is the founder and CEO of SynBio Africa, a forum for advancing synthetic biology on the continent. Otim has extensive health security experience and spent more than eight years at a polio and measles laboratory in Uganda, working on outbreak response.

He also consults for the UN while completing his doctoral work at the University of Queensland, which focuses on producing sustainable aviation fuel from genetically engineered microbial strains.

This offers tremendous promise, especially for Africa. The continent has and continues to endure extensive resource extraction, leading to African countries relying heavily on raw exports, which are commonly controlled by international companies and largely fail to translate to wealth for Africa’s people. Synthetic biology offers the potential to change the game.

In 2018, Otim founded East Africa’s first International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team. iGEM is an international organization that aims to foster talent and hosts the world’s largest synthetic biology competition. “We are determined to use synthetic biology to create both a better Africa and a better world,” Otim’s iGEM team said in a statement.

Three years later, Otim spearheaded the first synthetic biology conference on the continent. He’s a strong advocate for using synthetic biology to create sustainable biofuels and potentially revolutionize the African economy, generate clean energy, and greatly improve health outcomes for all of humanity. —Shayna Korol, Future Perfect fellow

Soham Sankaran calls himself a “lapsed computer science researcher.” He left Cornell’s PhD program in robotics during the first year of the pandemic and took a sharp turn into — of all things — biology. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he watched India’s brutal Delta wave and ensuing vaccine shortages, and he decided that if no one in India was going to build cutting-edge vaccine tech, he would.

In late 2021, he founded PopVax, an mRNA vaccine startup in Hyderabad, a major city in southern India.

PopVax is trying to build broadly protective vaccines — shots that can protect against whole families of viruses, not just one strain at a time. To do that, Sankaran’s team uses computer models to predict which parts of a virus are least likely to change, and design mRNA vaccines that train the immune system to target those stable pieces. They’re also building the tools and capacity to make these kinds of vaccines, eventually at scale.

And the work is starting to get noticed. The National Institutes of Health will test PopVax’s next-gen Covid-19 booster in US clinical trials this year. The Gates Foundation is funding the team’s push to make mRNA vaccines that stay stable in an ordinary drive, and BARDA — the US government’s biomedical R&D agency — awarded PopVax $2 million in January 2025 to develop a needle-free patch for an mRNA flu vaccine that could be self-applied like a Band-Aid.

Sankaran’s pitch for this work is as moral as it is technical. He’s driven by the memory of AIDS-era drug inequity — when lifesaving HIV medicines were locked behind Western patents — and the belief that a life in Lagos or Lucknow should count the same as one in Los Angeles. “Unless we control intellectual property…we will continue to be treated as second class,” he said in a podcast appearance on Bretton Goods, “so, we have to do the research ourselves.”

With PopVax, he is trying to make that vision real — proving that smarter vaccine designs, faster platforms, and local capacity that can turn pandemic response from charity into competence, and more importantly, move lifesaving vaccines from the margins to the mainstream in the Global South. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

Screwworms — gnarly flesh-eating parasites with a notorious reputation — are back at the US’s doorstep. Last month, Mexico confirmed a case in the northern border state of Nuevo León, less than 70 miles from Texas, and both countries are scrambling to hold the line.

It’s a familiar crisis for Maxwell Scott, the molecular geneticist at North Carolina State University who’s devoted much of his career to outsmarting the screwworm.

The US first beat these pests in the 1950s and ’60s using something called the sterile insect technique: The US Department of Agriculture would flood the landscape with sterilized males so wild females mate with them and lay eggs that never hatch. That strategy worked so well that, by the 1990s, screwworms were eliminated from the US and Mexico and pushed back to a narrow barrier in Panama’s Darién Gap. Today, Panama still maintains that sterile-fly barrier, a decades-long living fence keeping these pests from creeping north again.
Scott was so inspired by that success that he has been quietly reinventing it for the 21st century.

In his lab, Scott built a male-only screwworm line so control programs can release just males. This way there are no stray females, and every released fly competes for mates in the wild. It’s “a green technology,” he told me in a recent interview, “because it’s the pest itself that’s the control agent.” One of his engineered strains of the insect has even been field tested in Panama to measure how far the males flew and how long they lasted.

He’s also pushing the idea further with CRISPR, a gene-editing tool that can rewrite DNA with surgical precision. Instead of sterilizing males and releasing them over and over again — an expensive routine that never fully keeps the flies from rebounding — these CRISPR-edited flies carry a genetic tweak that breaks the fertility gene in some of their offspring, making them unable to reproduce and thinning the population from within.

It’s a fix that could reshape how we control screwworms. But for now, Scott says, it’s grounded more by politics than by science. “In the United States, we may never move away from [traditionally] sterilized males,” partly because of public wariness about genetic engineering. But in places like South America, where screwworms remain a scourge, these tools might find a warmer welcome, he says.

Scott’s work sits at the uneasy frontier of climate, genetics, and food security — exactly the kind of science we’ll need more of as a warming world helps parasites push farther and faster. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

In the paddies of China’s Yangtze River basin, the future of rice may hinge on a single gene.

Yibo Li, a plant geneticist at Huazhong Agricultural University, has helped uncover a temperature-sensitive gene in rice that threatens yields and grain quality as global temperatures rise. And now, he’s found a way to essentially turn it off.

Li and his team tested more than 530 rice varieties across four locations where nighttime temperatures have increased, searching for strains that could withstand heat. By examining which grains became chalky and which stayed translucent, they tracked the genetic markers responsible for the plant’s response. Their work, published earlier this year in the journal Cell, showed that modifying the gene or breeding naturally heat-resistant variants produced rice that retained both yield and quality under hot conditions.

This “reflects real-world environments, making the identified resistance genes more authentic and readily applicable to breeding programs,” Li told the Washington Post. In practical terms, the modified rice maintained its yield while unmodified crops produced up to 58 percent less grain — a dramatic difference with enormous implications for global food security. More than half of the world’s population relies on rice as a primary food staple.

Li’s vision extends beyond rice. He sees his findings as a possible template for tackling the climate challenge in other staple crops, like wheat, aiming to break the traditional trade-off between yield and quality. “Ultimately, we aim to develop innovative breeding strategies for high-yield, superior-quality crops,” he said. In a world where every extra degree of warmth can devastate harvests, Yibo Li’s work could be revolutionary for global food security. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor