Building the Evidence Layer: Inside the Pathogen Catalogue
From Our Product Manager, Farraz Mir
Note from the MicroDAO team: As we open sign-ups for the closed beta of the Pathogen Catalogue, we asked Farraz, the product manager leading its development, to share why we’re building this, what’s inside the first release, and where the Catalogue is headed next. What follows is his perspective - shaped by months of building, testing, and talking to users.
Backstory
Over the past several months, Farraz has been leading development of the Pathogen Catalogue, previously known as the Pathogen Solutions Marketplace, until it became clear the old name no longer captured the mission. “Marketplace” felt too transactional and didn’t reflect the deeper purpose behind the tool. Credit goes to Shane, our UX designer, who helped shape the shift toward a name that better aligns with what this platform is designed to become.
For the Lord of the Rings fans: Farraz often jokes that the Catalogue feels like a modern-age Palantír, a living window into the world of pathogens and resistance. Internally, however, the comparison that stuck early is: a Bloomberg Terminal for pathogens. Not because it is complex, but because it brings together the information people need in a clean, standardised, and actionable way.
So What Is the Pathogen Catalogue?
At its core, Pathogen Catalogue is being built for anyone exhausted by the friction that comes with working on AMR today: jumping between PDFs, government portals, academic papers, dashboards, and spreadsheets just to answer a basic question.
Before you can even model an outbreak or design an intervention, you lose days or weeks cleaning data that should already be interoperable.
The Bloomberg analogy isn’t decorative. Before Bloomberg, traders relied on siloed feeds, slow updates, and manual lookups. One consolidated, standardised interface transformed decision-making.
AMR today is stuck in the “pre-Bloomberg” phase - data exists, but it is rarely findable, accessible, interoperable, or reusable for the people who need it the most.
During COVID-19, epidemiologists began with community spreadsheets before structured datasets emerged. With AMR, we cannot afford that lag.
The Pathogen Catalogue is our attempt to make sure the evidence people need is structured and usable before the next crisis forces improvisation.
Like Bloomberg reduced information asymmetry and reaction time for finance, Pathogen Catalogue aims to reduce the time between “I need to understand this pathogen” and “I know what to do.”
The Modules
For the first few releases, Farraz and the team have prioritised three modules based on interviews with researchers, public health teams, policymakers, and industry experts.
The beta will include:
Epidemiology
Research
Industry
A fourth module, Economic Impact, is planned for a later release in 2026.
Here is what each covers.
Epidemiology
This module provides core epidemiological indicators for each pathogen- incidence, mortality, disease burden, and related metrics frequently used by public health teams. This is where we start turning scattered public data into something closer to usable evidence.
A key challenge surfaced early: much of this data is not openly available, especially for priority AMR pathogens. This pushed the team to develop ways to infer disease-level metrics while sourcing and validating more accurate data streams. We welcome collaborators interested in helping strengthen these models. In addition to this, we have built mechanisms for users to flag gaps in data and raise requests for data collection.
Industry
The Industry module brings together insights useful to pharma, diagnostics, biotech, and policy teams.
It helps users quickly identify resource gaps at individual pathogen level, on questions like
Where are diagnostic tools lacking?
How mature are therapeutic pipelines?
Where might system vulnerabilities appear during an outbreak?
This module aims to enable faster investment decisions, smarter pipeline assessments, and clearer situational awareness across industry and policy sectors.
Research Module
For the Research module, the team has curated structured prompts and literature pathways that surface the most relevant scientific work for each pathogen. The goal is to help researchers see the landscape clearly, uncover gaps, and avoid duplicating effort.
This module focuses especially on questions central to AMR - mechanisms of resistance, clinical implications, molecular drivers, and emerging directions.
What’s Coming Later: Economic Impact
The Economic Impact module - planned for release later in 2026, will provide data on the economic burden of specific pathogens, including effects on productivity, healthcare systems, labour markets, and national GDP.
Understanding economic impact is essential for aligning incentives and advocating effectively for investment, but it requires careful modelling. That work is underway, but it will not be part of the closed beta.
Where We’re Headed
Everything described above represents the starting point, not the final vision.
As Farraz puts it:
“We expect the Catalogue you see next year to look different from the beta, but the goal remains the same, to drastically reduce the time and effort required for people to act on AMR. Over time, the Catalogue is meant to evolve from a reference tool into a shared evidence layer , one that supports faster analysis, better prioritisation, and more informed decision-making across AMR research and response.”
We’re exploring ways to integrate real-world data streams, which are largely missing from open platforms today, and which would dramatically increase the Catalogue’s analytical power.
Users already expressing interest span:
public health agencies
policy teams
AMR surveillance groups
researchers mapping resistance or literature gaps
pharma and biotech evaluating unmet need
The team has also been studying several post-COVID surveillance frameworks that map surprisingly well to what the Catalogue aims to become. We will share these insights in more detail in our upcoming white paper.
Join the Closed Beta
We are opening sign-ups for the Pathogen Catalogue’s closed beta.
The first batch is estimated to begin mid–January 2026, with additional cohorts planned.
If you work with pathogens, AMR, public health data, policy, or solution-building, we would love for you to test it and help shape the next iteration.
👉 Register your interest in the closed beta here.
By joining the closed beta, you are not just testing a product, you are helping shape the first shared evidence layer we’re building for AMR.
Your feedback will help build a tool that we hope becomes foundational in the fight against AMR.