Location: Zoonotic and Emerging Disease Research
Project Number: 3022-32000-021-015-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2024
End Date: May 1, 2025
Objective:
Contribute towards the continuous surveillance of viral pathogens and enhance our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of pathogen risks and their potential impact on public health. This sequencing technology is intended to minimize delays between sample collection and accurate assessment of pathogens.
Approach:
Approximately 75% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, making their detection and characterization crucial for understanding the threat they pose to both human and animal health. This threat is in many ways one of scale; immense viral diversity harbored within a myriad of known or suspected animal hosts that interact with humans via agriculture, hunting, or even shared vectors.
Accordingly, discovering or monitoring zoonotic emerging disease can amount to looking for a (viral) needle in a haystack. New low-burden approaches to pathogen monitoring like wastewater biosurveillance are allowing better interrogation of samples from many individuals that are naturally pooled, in this case by engineered or de facto sanitation runoff.
To accomplish this work Ginkgo Bioworks (GBW, “COOPERATOR”) ) will collaborate with the USDA ARS National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), and the NBAF Zoonotic and Emerging Disease Research Unit (ZEDRU, “AGENCY”) and other government contracted organizations (i.e., UCLA/INRB, “CONTRACTORS”) to agree on data sharing terms (Task 1), sharings and/or transfer of relevant technical information (e.g., laboratory protocols; Task 2), train and/or integrate Ginkgo’s bioinformatic resources with ongoing zoonotic pathogen surveillance (Task 3), and produce an initial pilot-scale bioinformatic analysis from a sequenced pathogen (Task 4).
