Our planet is teeming with trillions of viruses and bacteria, most of which are innocuous or even helpful, but some pose a significant risk to public health, animals, and crops. In recent decades, governments have implemented piecemeal efforts to identify biological threats and safeguard against the use of bioweapons. That’s not enough, warns Matthew McKnight (MBA/MPP 2012) of the Boston-based biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks.

McKnight believes a comprehensive global warning system is needed to maintain a constant watch for pathogens, including those engineered by humans, that will enable countries to rapidly quell potential pandemics.

“The earlier you detect, the faster you nip something in the bud,” observes McKnight, general manager of Concentric, Ginkgo’s biosecurity division. He leads a 170-person team with the ambitious goal of implementing around-the-clock detection of hazardous novel viruses and bacteria, so they can be addressed early enough to thwart infectious diseases and prevent the human and economic toll the world experienced during the recent pandemic.

For a host of technical and logistical reasons, we are still decades away from the full reality of instant detection and response, McKnight estimates. Nevertheless, he says, “we have to start laying this infrastructure,” just as the United States put in place robust systems to defend against potential nuclear strikes and, more recently, cyberattacks.

When the firm started in 2008 with a group of funders that included Bill Gates, Ginkgo Bioworks focused on engineering cells for applications in food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and more. The company employs more than a thousand people, and its customers aim to use Ginkgo’s custom-designed organisms to make everything from life-saving medicines to juicy meatless burgers.

Early on, Ginkgo had plans to branch out into biosecurity. The thinking was, McKnight says, “If we’re going to build a bioengineering platform, then we’d better also care how that platform is used, and we’d better use those cutting-edge technologies to also build the most advanced security capabilities for biology.” The coronavirus presented a “crucible moment,” he acknowledges. Concentric launched in 2020 with a COVID-19 testing service for schools and senior-living facilities, giving those institutions insight into positivity rates that could inform safe operations. As the testing program wound down in late 2022, McKnight was focused on a bigger project: leveraging Ginkgo’s biotech knowledge to create a pandemic-free world.

Today, Concentric’s product is a three-part biosecurity package: collection, detection, and analysis. Its customers are the world’s governments, and the division accounted for almost a third of Ginkgo’s reported $55 million revenue in the third quarter of 2023.

McKnight and his team are currently working with 14 countries to develop pathogen-monitoring programs—what Concentric calls a “bioradar” system. The most public aspect of this system is currently on display at nine international airports, from New York’s JFK to Qatar’s Hamad International Airport, which samples flights originating in 105 countries. Concentric pulls wastewater from just-landed airplanes and collects nasal swabs from more than 6,000 volunteer passengers a week. (McKnight anticipates one day being able to extract samples from the air.) That collected biological material is then sent to Concentric’s network of labs to test for pathogens.

“Our alerting mechanism today is: Did somebody show up with something bad in the hospital?” McKnight says. “It’s after the infection has spread. That’s not when you would want to find it.”

Concentric’s bioradar has already proven effective at providing earlier warnings. In 2022, Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance—a program Concentric runs for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at seven American airports—detected Omicron BA.3 some 43 days before the subvariant was reported anywhere else in the country. In November 2023, the CDC expanded Concentric’s remit to scan for other headline-making respiratory viruses such as influenza and RSV.

The final piece of the puzzle—analyzing a detected pathogen and identifying the risk level and required response—is the trickiest. Moreover, it must be determined if the biothreat is natural, accidental, or intentional. McKnight believes artificial intelligence can help answer these questions, thus speeding up the process of comparing a pathogen’s makeup to huge sets of available data to unlock the mysteries of unknown viruses and bacteria.

With a research contract from the United States Intelligence Community, Ginkgo has developed a tool called ENDAR (meaning engineered nucleotide detection and ranking) to detect when an organism has been genetically modified by humans. In recent tests, the software platform detected human manipulation with more than 90 percent accuracy. Eventually, ENDAR will tap into Concentric’s bioradar data—that’s 12.8 million samples from across six continents and counting. (No countries have yet deployed it.)

To achieve a truly comprehensive pathogen response, nations need to commit to “sustained investment,” McKnight says. Technologies at each step along the chain need to get faster and better, and monitoring needs to expand beyond airports to other points of entry, hospitals and labs, and even conflict zones and natural disasters (two environments in which disease often emerges). Most challenging, once a nation has an effective biosecurity system, is that it must share information to create a global network.

“Countries individually, and then together, have to have the aspiration and investment to build the detection and response infrastructure,” McKnight notes. He sees reasons for optimism. In 2023, the United Kingdom announced its intent to build a real-time biothreat radar, and the US Department of Defense released its first-ever biodefense review, calling for an early warning system.

Still, “this is very much an education sale,” McKnight says. “We’re going to build what we know is right and then try to convince governments and corporations to deploy it.”

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