10 million samples and counting: Building the global immune system of the future
June 30 2022
Something truly amazing has happened this week—Ginkgo Biosecurity has officially exceeded ten million individual COVID-19 samples tested. That’s a big number, and an important public health milestone that we should all take a moment to think about.
In that 10 million are kids who got to go to class, basketball games, and school dances across the country. Teachers who felt a sense of confidence walking into their classrooms. Health care workers who showed up to perform tests every day. And school leaders and health officials who had timely data that they could use to make informed decisions for their communities.
The biosecurity news cycle can be dismal, and so many in our communities are still devastated by the effects COVID-19 has had on our lives. But it is in this context of collective hardship that we can best understand the impact that our community-centered biosecurity platform can have.
Piece by piece, we’re building the global immune system of the future. We envision next-generation biosecurity built into natural and engineered systems around the world, ready to rapidly detect, intercept, and respond to biological threats. We believe that no one should go through this devastating ordeal again, and that if we effectively use the tools we have available, we never have to.
The scale of this effort is massive. To reach 10 million samples, we’ve touched communities across nearly ¾ of U.S. states (37, so far) and facilitated testing at well over 5,000 test sites to date. We continue to grow and maintain this presence domestically, adapting our offerings to include sequencing and variant identification, passive monitoring options, and self-reporting of at-home test results. And we do this while being responsive to the particular needs of diverse and often vulnerable communities, empowering them to manage public health in context.
There is so much more to come.
We’ve sequenced over 35,000 viral samples to date (from humans, animals, and the environment) and are scaling up that capability. We’re taking concrete steps to take our pathogen monitoring network global through a series of international partnerships. We’re increasingly starting to look beyond COVID-19, to build infrastructure that can flex to respond to a variety of infectious diseases.
We are, in real time, building a shared vision and platform for biosecurity and public health that is global, caring, and community-centered to its core. Thank you for partnering with us.
