The word pandemic entered the common vocabulary this year with the spread of Covid-19, leaving everyone searching for solutions.

Having the skillset to model pandemics is now in greater demand than ever, but few have come up to speed.

Metabiota's team has been working on pandemic risk mitigation for over a decade, with a focus on building out data, analytic, and modelling tools over the past five years. Metabiota draws on its scientific and technical experts with over 200 years of combined experience in disease surveillance, computational epidemiology, and actuarial science.

The company specialises in developing data, indices, models, and analytical tools to quantify the risk and potential losses posed by infectious disease, the effects of mitigation efforts, and supports the development of novel risk transfer products to address the economic threat posed by disease outbreaks.

Its global database of historical and near-real-time data includes data for no less than 2,500 epidemics. Metabiota's historical dataset is greatly augmented by its large scale computational epidemiological modelling system, which applies a catastrophe modelling framework to generate exceedance probability metrics.

The company has furthermore sought to share knowledge within the actuarial and insurance communities, through scientific publications, conferences, workshops, and public engagements—vital in this time of crisis.

One of its earliest collaborations was with Munich Re in 2016, which, with Metabiota's support developed insurance for economic losses caused by epidemics using Metabiota's Sentiment Score and economic loss modelling tools. Since launching the PathogenRX insurance solution in 2018, Metabiota, Marsh, and Munich Re have worked on multiple underwriting solutions.

Tom van den Brulle, head of innovation at Munich Re, praised Metabiota's analytics and intelligence which has helped the company push the boundaries of insurability by protecting companies and local economies from the financial losses of epidemics.

He said: "This really is the next frontier for the insurance industry – given the high risk of infectious disease outbreaks, it is imperative that we find new ways to manage and finance these risks for our customers."