Building a Global Bioradar System

Connections between people, animals, and the environment determine how viruses spread. Climate change and migration patterns are rewiring the way viruses jump from one species to another.

Biology doesn’t respect borders and Concentric is installing key collection points (called “nodes”) throughout a global pathogen monitoring network. These nodes, which can be set up at airports, farms, land borders, and elsewhere, enable nations to identify biological threats before they show in the clinic. Concentric’s bioradar can track pathogens as they evolve, and give decision makers an early warning about what’s coming.

This detection-analysis model is based on the CDC’s Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program (TGS), which Ginkgo operates at six international US airports. TGS has helped the CDC discover variants of COVID-19 weeks before they appeared in clinical data. In working with international public health and other agencies, we are expanding on that success, to address biological threats, at global scale.

Our bioinformatic services deliver insights on pathogens of interest, as well as offer the ability to detect evolutions and shifts in variants. Ginkgo also worked with the intelligence community to develop an initial set of computational tools called ENDAR (Engineered Nucleotide Detection and Ranking) that help analysts find genetic engineering in next generation sequencing (NGS) datasets. Developed in collaboration with IARPA, and using proprietary AI, tools like ENDAR enable us to provide a suite of biosecurity tools at scale.

Once the nodes have collected samples, we run state-of-the-art detection, testing, and bioinformatic analysis, which can offer information about the variants present, and can contextualize a pathogen of interest so that Concentric’s experts can provide decision support to national security and public health decision-makers.