Overview
Biosecurity for the Century of Biology
An increasingly interconnected world means more frequent risks from biological threats.
At Ginkgo, we seek to mitigate these risks, offering biosecurity and biodefense solutions for the 21st century. Our cutting-edge biological intelligence platform empowers national security decision makers to identify and respond to emerging biological threats.
Learn more about Ginkgo Biosecurity.
Providing early warning for pathogens
Biology doesn’t respect borders. Ginkgo’s biosecurity technology tracks deadly pathogens worldwide through our globally scaled platform, the first of its kind, and detects outbreaks in near real-time.
Ginkgo’s bioradar is made up of key collection points that are the backbone of our pathogen monitoring network. These nodes, which can be set up at airports, farms, land borders, and elsewhere, can identify the source of a threat by collecting, detecting, and characterizing environmental samples — mitigating outbreaks before they become national emergencies. By coupling bioradar with our AI-powered analysis tools, national security decision makers can receive actionable biointelligence that provides an early warning about what’s coming.
The end-to-end platform for real-time biosecurity
Once the nodes in our global bioradar network have collected samples, we run state-of-the-art detection, testing, and bioinformatic analysis to determine the origin of a biological threat. This can offer information about the variants present in a sample of interest, and contextualize pathogens so that Ginkgo’s experts can provide decision support.
This detection-analysis model is based on the CDC’s Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program (TGS), which Ginkgo operates at seven international US airports. TGS has helped the CDC discover variants of COVID-19 weeks before they appeared in clinical data. In working with governments around the world, 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. Additionally, Ginkgo has worked with the intelligence community to develop ENDAR (Engineered Nucleotide Detection and Ranking), a set of computational tools that use artificial intelligence to help analysts find genetic engineering in next generation sequencing (NGS) datasets. Developed in collaboration with IARPA, tools like ENDAR enable us to provide biosecurity tools at scale.
Ginkgo’s Foundry supercharges our biosecurity offerings
Ginkgo’s Foundry is home to the best of DNA synthesis, sequencing, laboratory automation, and high-performance analytics. It’s where we sequenced the first instances of Omicron BA.2 and BA.3 in the U.S. as part of the CDC’s traveler-based early detection program. Building our biosecurity offerings around the Foundry magnifies our knowledge of pathogen genomics. What we learn there can help accelerate effective responses (like vaccine development) and help ensure we are designing innovative biosecurity measures into new technologies from the start.