Seek Labs, a private TechBio company building programmable platforms to decode, program, and resolve diseases, today announced it has mapped CRISPR-addressable regions across 25 out of 25 viral families known to infect humans, creating a comprehensive atlas of viral genetic vulnerabilities that may support faster identification of antiviral target sites against known pathogens, emerging variants, and future outbreak threats.
Antiviral development has been reactive: a virus emerges, the world scrambles to characterize it, and countermeasure development begins under crisis conditions. Recent Ebola outbreaks illustrate both the success and the gap in today’s approach. For Zaire ebolavirus, there is an approved vaccine, demonstrating targeted intervention against a lethal virus can be clinically meaningful and globally crucial. But Bundibugyo virus, another ebolavirus, highlights the limitations of species- and strain-specific countermeasures.
Seek Labs’ approach is built for this gap.
By mapping CRISPR-addressable regions across the viral families known to infect humans, the company addresses one of the earliest bottlenecks in outbreak response: identifying biologically relevant viral target regions quickly enough to inform rapid countermeasure development.
“Zaire ebolavirus demonstrates the impact of having an effective countermeasure ready. Bundibugyo virus shows us that related threats, even in the same viral genus, can emerge beyond the reach of existing vaccines,” said Douglas Gladue, PhD of Seek Labs. “Our platform is intended to support genus-level, pathogen-specific, and multiplexed approaches to antiviral discovery.”
The milestone strengthens Seek Labs’ position as a platform company rather than a single-pathogen program. The target atlas enables the company to:
- Identify candidate CRISPR guide regions in replication-relevant viral sequences.
- Prioritize viral families and pathogens based on target density, accessibility, and strategic relevance.
- Support development of multiplexed guide panels intended to reduce escape risk.
- Build a scalable antiviral pipeline from a shared computational and biological discovery engine.
Seek Labs plans to use the atlas to prioritize lead viral families and pathogens for further experimental validation, including evaluation of target accessibility, guide activity, viral replication impact, multiplexing strategies, and in silico safety considerations.
About BioSeeker
BioSeeker is Seek Labs’ AI-powered discovery engine designed to analyze thousands of sequences to identify the regions a pathogen cannot mutate without losing essential function. By focusing on these functionally critical regions, BioSeeker identifies durable targets for intervention, producing outputs that power the company’s platforms across Sequence Ablation Therapeutics and molecular diagnostics. As new sequence data emerges, BioSeeker continuously updates its models, providing a dynamic foundation for programmable, sequence-directed discovery.
About Seek Labs
Every disease has a sequence. Seek Labs is a TechBio company building the systems to decode, program, and resolve diseases. At the core of this system is an AI-powered intelligence layer that analyzes and translates sequences into actionable data, informing two deployment layers across Sequence Ablation Therapeutics (SAT) and molecular detection. Together, these systems form a continuous loop where genomic data is decoded, translated into therapeutic and diagnostic outputs, and refined through real-world deployment.
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Seek Labs is a proud member of BioHive, Utah’s collaborative life sciences ecosystem. Together with our partners, we’re building faster, smarter solutions for the world’s most urgent health challenges.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260608162786/en/
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