In the case of Caribou, that came as a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided $100,000 to fund work on using Cas6 as a tool to diagnose viral infections. “We plan on creating a suite of enzymes that specifically recognize RNA sequences characteristic of viruses including HIV, hepatitis C and influenza,” Doudna wrote in her proposal to the foundation. It was a prelude to the funding Doudna would receive from Gates in 2020 to use CRISPR systems to detect coronaviruses.7
