IARPA, Ginkgo Bioworks and Draper Announce New Technologies to Detect Engineered DNA
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research and development arm of the U.S. Intelligence community, Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA), the leading horizontal platform for cell programming and Draper, a nonprofit engineering innovation firm, today announced the completion of IARPA's Finding Engineering-Linked Indicators ( FELIX) program
BOSTON, Oct. 17, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research and development arm of the U.S. Intelligence community, Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA), the leading horizontal platform for cell programming and Draper, a nonprofit engineering innovation firm, today announced the completion of IARPA's Finding Engineering-Linked Indicators ( FELIX) program. The program was created to augment and improve current biodetection and biosurveillance capabilities. Specifically, Ginkgo has developed a suite of new computational tools and Draper has developed a new experimental platform to help detect and identify when samples include genetically engineered biological systems. The results from the program will be presented on October 17, 2022 at 11am Eastern on YouTube.
Current methods for detecting signs of biological engineering are typically costly, slow, and capable of detecting only a subset of all possible genetic modifications. In collaboration with IARPA, Ginkgo developed an initial set of computational tools called ENDAR (Engineered Nucleotide Detection and Ranking) that assist trained analysts to identify genetic engineering in next generation sequencing (NGS) datasets. This software aims to make it possible for scientists to detect engineered DNA at scale.
"Through their work on the FELIX program, Ginkgo and Draper have achieved two major breakthroughs for the biodetection community," said David A. Markowitz, Program Manager at IARPA. "The ability to detect genetic engineering in complex biological samples has long been a moonshot goal, and these new capabilities are poised to transform national biosecurity efforts."
Designed to work across a range of biological organisms that may be found in complex, multi-species environments, ENDAR tools and methods could provide early alerts to the presence of engineered organisms and help expedite appropriate responses, thereby mitigating adverse consequences.
