The common cold isn’t just a nuisance, it’s also responsible for nearly 200 million missed school days, and costs the U.S. economy roughly $40 billion each year. According to a recent CNBC article, Amazon is working on a vaccine to combat the issue. The top secret project, which goes by “Project Gesundheit,” has apparently been in work for years with a small group inside Grand Challenge, a research and development group under Amazon’s cloud division, AWS.
The reason a cure for the common cold has proven elusive is that there are 160 different strains of rhinovirus, the virus that causes it. Amazon isn’t alone in this quest though; researchers at Stanford are working on their own cure for the cold that involves temporarily disabling a single protein in human cells.
![“Another key [UDI] benefit, because we're calling that product by the same name across the healthcare supply chain… rich and robust data that we can access around supply consumption and utilization rates. One of the buzz terms we've heard during the COVID-19 crisis was what's my burn rate? How fast am I going through gowns, masks, gloves?” – Mike Schiller, Senior Director at AHRMM](https://img.healthcarepackaging.com/files/base/pmmi/all/image/2020/08/UDI.5f4d326e41d53.png?auto=format&fit=crop&h=146&w=340)
