SecureBio

We hope this preprint serves as a catalyst for more untargeted wastewater metagenomics efforts, growing the systems and infrastructure needed to prevent emerging threats to human health. Link to preprint: doi.org/10.64898/2026.…

This sequencing explains the seasonality of these viruses, the strains that are circulating, and the unique composition of wastewater samples by location. We demonstrate the viability of deep, untargeted wastewater metagenomics for tracking existing and novel human pathogens.

CASPER is a national wastewater surveillance program that collected and analyzed 1,206 samples covering more than 13 million people. For this preprint, a total of 1.2 trillion read pairs were generated, which represents the largest wastewater sequencing effort ever undertaken.

Our work isn't changing. We're continuing to defend against pathogens designed to evade detection: evaluating biosurveillance approaches, developing lab and computational methods, and piloting early warning systems.

SecureBio now has two major areas of work: Detection and AI. Both teams collaborate closely, and operating under one name makes it easier to understand what we do and how the pieces fit together.

The Nucleic Acid Observatory is now SecureBio Detection. We're the same team, at the same organization, doing the same work, but the new name makes it clearer how we fit into SecureBio as a whole.

Read a longer summary on our blog (naobservatory.org/blog/airplane-…) and the full preprint at medrxiv.org/content/10.648…

Work done in collaboration with Ginkgo Biosecurity and the CDC.

New preprint: We applied untargeted viral metagenomics to composite airplane wastewater and found that human viruses had much higher relative abundance (median 13-fold) compared to municipal treatment-plant wastewater. This could substantially cut the cost of using metagenomics to detect emerging viruses.

2025 was another eventful and impactful year for SecureBio's AI team – we've written up the highlights of what we accomplished and hope to build on this year. open.substack.com/pub/securebio/…

By building systems using unbiased sequencing approaches, we can avoid these issues, allowing us to respond faster than ever to emerging threats. Both Casper, our wastewater program, and Zephyr, our anonymous swab sampling program, use these technologies to detect both the old and new. Read our blog post for more details: naobservatory.org/blog/pcr-failu…

And it comes up every year, when influenza A subtypes mutate to the point where we have to design new assays or risk missing them entirely.

From novel influenza to measles, we can’t predict what the next biological threat will be. Most pathogen detection requires knowing what you're looking for. Ours doesn't.