Our arsenal is new; the threat is too.

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Over the past two decades, we have seen genome sequencing decrease in price by nine orders of magnitude and have increased our data generation by 19,000 times per year. What seemed like fiction just five years ago has turned into reality with the design of highly efficacious mRNA vaccines in days. The opportunity in biodefense is to turn this arsenal into a globally scalable technology stack that will make its users 10-100 times more secure.

It is important to note that this space is historically unsexy, old, and industrial. We think a tech-native biodefense company could extract a lot more value, for example from data about pathogens and who they infect, to in turn develop therapeutics, adjust supply chains, improve productivity, and bioharden real estate.

The good news is we roughly know what we need to build. The biodefense stack looks something like:

1. Early detection: in the case of a really concerning pathogen, buying an extra week or two of time is the single most important action we can take. This means we need to catch the most concerning pathogens in hours or a day. This includes passive environmental detection (e.g. Biobot Analytics, Ginkgo Bioworks [Concentric]*, Kromek, Bugseq); rapid pathogen identification (e.g. T2 Biosystems, BioFlyte, Biofire, Clear Labs); at-home PCR-quality diagnostics (e.g. Cue, Detect, Lucira); commercial pathogenic risk monitoring (e.g. Poppy). The main opportunities are to make detection and collection ~10x cheaper, faster, and easier to use passively in-situ.
2. Pathogen characterization: identify if a pathogen is (a) dangerous (b) novel and/or (c) growing fast. Apriori Bio launched with $50m to predict the mutational landscape of concerning variants. Both assays and software are very limited in this area.
3. Infectious disease intelligence: if a pathogen is detected, and it’s going to be bad, what does the public sector (e.g., Department of Defense) or private sector (e.g., big tech) need to know about it? The opportunity here is to deeply integrate with soldier and employee health, physical layouts, logistics plans, and supply chain data to build a custom response for each organization, like The Public Health Company or BlueDot are trying to do.
4. Biohardening the physical environment: install physical hardware that can spot infection and sterilize air and surfaces. Far-UVC lights, for example, can inactive 90% of viruses within seconds in a target area (e.g. R-Zero or Lumen Labs); MERV-class filters perform similarly, and a few companies are building software to monitor pathogens in the air (e.g. Poppy, ParticleOne, SafeTraces). The opportunity we see here the most is building the business case to deploy already proven Far-UVC and air filtration technology. We have yet to see a company for self-sterilizing, personalized PPE that makes PPE extremely easy (and fun) to wear.
5. Medical countermeasures: in the worst case scenario, the main challenge is to design, produce, and deliver hundreds of millions of doses of prophylactics or therapeutics within just days or weeks (it took about 10 months in COVID). We were extremely lucky that Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech existed during COVID, but there are a large number of bottlenecks with mRNA vaccine production. We also need to make vaccines different, namely shelf-stable and easily deliverable, like Alvea’s vaccines or Vaxxas’ microneedle array. We also need to develop vaccines and antivirals for rapid off-the-shelf repurposing when a threat emerges. A last space is for novel experimental countermeasures, like therapeutic interfering particles.
6. Accelerants: several generalizable inputs will differentially accelerate biosecurity, like better threat intelligence and pathogen characterization software (e.g. OneCodex [acq’d]), lab automation (e.g. Strateos), and biomanufacturing (e.g. National Resilience).

One might think that the answer is entirely vaccines, antivirals, or antibiotics. In reality, for the most significant threats – think, global infection in a month – the most important thing you can do is buy extra time. Detecting early, reacting quickly, and eliminating physical spread are the things that let you do that.

*Concentric by Ginkgo, Ginkgo's biosecurity and public health offering, generated $334 million in Biosecurity revenue in 2022.