The future of global health is at stake. These 7 pioneers could revolutionize it.

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.

This story is part of the 2025 Future Perfect 25

Every year, the Future Perfect team curates the undersung activists, organizers, and thinkers who are making the world a better place. This year’s honorees are all keeping progress on global health and development alive. Read more about the project here, and check out the other categories:

Have ideas for who should be on next year’s list? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com.

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

César de la Fuente

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

Esther Wanjiru Kimani

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........

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