If you detect it early enough, you just snuff it out, okay? So our bioradar product, where we collect samples from wastewater on planes and anonymously from voluntary swabs from passengers on airlines, is exactly the type of infrastructure we’re building to do this type of monitoring. This bioradar product enables continuous data collection. So not just on COVID, but we just announced we’re expanding to over 30 pathogen targets. We announced an expansion of our partnership with the CDC just this week. Some of these pathogens have actually little to no genetic data publicly available in recent years. So we’re really tackling some big blind spots with this expansion into more disease. We’re up and running in 9 international airports so far, and that means we’re already getting visibility into flights originating from over 100 countries.
In addition to airports, we’re working in complex zones. And this quarter, we’ve made a lot of progress with new efforts to monitor agricultural and animal samples from zoonotic spillover, including partnering on 2 new USDA-funded projects. And we’re now progressing to deepen our analytical insights by integrating AI-based tools with our bioradar data. And we’re examining historical epidemic data and routinely use common AI methods for bioinformatics, genetic engineering detection, I’ve talked about before, our work with IARPA there, and modeling. And these will continue to get better as our AI platform gets better. But right now, we’re really excited to build new prediction capabilities, and we’re working with a consortium of partners funded by the CDC Center for Forecasting and Analytics to find new ways to tell when is the disease about to spike?
And what measures should you be take — should be taken against it. And again, I would highlight we already do this sort of thing for weather, right? Like when is that hurricane looking like it’s going to come in, right? Like where is it going to land and all that sort of stuff? This is exactly the kind of infrastructure we should have for infectious disease. So all of these data and analytic capabilities are at the foundation of our novel BIOINT so things like biointelligence product for national security as biological risk accelerates and intersects with global conflict and geopolitics, BIOINT will represent a critical component of intelligence capabilities. So this is now things like satellites, okay, yes, they’re looking for hurricanes, but they’re also looking for missile launches.
All right. So we also want to see if someone doing something, some type of misuse, we want to be monitoring to detect that. We’re working to build out a BIOINT platform that can support attribution, scenario-based response planning and medical countermeasures. And through this work, BIOINT will be able to address critical questions for security decision makers such as what threats and outbreaks are on the horizon? How dangerous is a new threat? Where does it emerge and how? What can I do about it? And the key here is that last part of what can you do about it, we’ll need BIOINT if we want to effectively neutralize biothreats before they cause a lot of damage. It’s a lot easier to put out that fire when it’s small than when it’s too late. All right.
Finally, I want to touch on why I think it’s so valuable to have Ginkgo’s Biosecurity business alongside our Cell Engineering business. These things make sense together. With our bioradar product and BIOINT, we can provide metagenomic data to feed our cell engineering platform. This is more data for training. And the tools we build for understanding biology in our cell engineering platform can be reused to make analytics better on the biosecurity side. Hey, I want to understand what this protein does is a useful thing for cell engineering. It’s also useful for an emerging pathogen. Finally, our biosecurity platform could also provide early warning information to help develop new countermeasures, vaccines and therapeutics that our cell engineering platform could help build, right?
Our customers develop vaccines and therapeutics, right? So both our biosecurity and cell engineering offerings enable one another, and we believe they’ll continue to grow, especially through the use of AI. Okay. In summary, I’m really excited about the great work we’ve done this quarter, especially the demonstration of our commercial sales engine with the Pfizer program I mentioned and our strategic relationship with Google and AI. And I’m looking forward to continuing our growth in this space. All right. Now I’ll hand it back to Megan for Q&A.
A – Megan LeDuc: Great. Thanks, Jason. As usual, I’ll with a question from the public. [Operator Instructions] Thanks all. Okay. Welcome back, everyone. Our first question comes from @cliffordmlong on Twitter, formerly known as X. What milestones will be tracked to measure Ginkgo’s success in building DNA’s AI? What metrics can you share that will track the accuracy improvements when building AI over time?
