For Continuously Evolving Threats like Avian Influenza, We Must Design Durable Anti-Viral Therapeutics
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) illustrates a clear and urgent application for Seek Labs’ platform based programmable therapeutic.
By Dr. Douglas Gladue | March 11, 2026
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) is a persistent and economically disruptive disease threat. It has been recognized for decades, but current viral behavior reflects a structural shift. What were once episodic outbreaks have become recurring seasonal events with substantial economic consequences. Tens of millions of birds have been culled in the United States alone in recent years, contributing to supply chain disruption and sustained price volatility across poultry and egg markets.
HPAI Remains an Active Threat
The persistence of HPAI reflects a deeper biological reality: influenza exists within a highly dynamic evolutionary system. The virus circulates in migratory wild bird reservoirs, where continuous mutation and reassortment generate new genomic variants across multiple host populations. These new genetically diverse viral strains can infect domestic poultry, requiring vaccines to be frequently updated to match circulating viruses. At the same time, traditional antivirals such as amantadine have shown limited long-term effectiveness, as influenza can rapidly develop resistance when these drugs are widely used.
HPAI persists through continuous circulation, evolution, and reintroduction. Control measures can interrupt outbreaks but not the evolutionary cycle driving them.
Why We Must Design for Durability
In this environment, countermeasures designed for continuously evolving pathogens face structural limitations. Viruses like HPAI require interventions that account for viral evolution from the outset.
Traditional vaccine strategies primarily target surface proteins such as hemagglutinin, which are highly immunogenic but are rapidly changing. Antigenic drift and shift can reduce vaccine effectiveness as new variants emerge.
These dynamics highlight the importance of durability as a foundational design principle in next-generation antiviral development. Rapidly evolving viruses require countermeasures that can withstand evolutionary pressure rather than respond only after effectiveness declines.
How Seek Labs is Approaching the Problem
At Seek Labs, we are approaching this challenge by designing durable interventions that account for viral evolution instead of reacting to it. Our Programmable Target Ablation Platform (PTAP)™ is a CRISPR-based system engineered to disrupt viral replication by targeting conserved regions of viral genomes, which are those genomic sequences that are essential to viral survival and less tolerant to mutation. This programmable targeting framework is designed to deliver durability beyond strain-specific solutions.
Under our framework, durability is not an incremental improvement; it is the central design principle.
A key component of this strategy is BioSeeker™, our AI-powered genomic intelligence engine. BioSeeker continuously analyzes global viral sequence data to identify conserved genomic targets and monitor how those targets evolve over time. These targets are then integrated into our design of programmable therapeutics, creating a fundamentally different architecture to shut down viral threats. PTAP and BioSeeker establish a repeatable and scalable architecture that can be deployed across evolving viral threats.
Why This Matters for HPAI and Beyond
HPAI provides a compelling initial deployment for PTAP given its global economic impact, regulatory attention, and recurring biological pressure. By accounting for durable design in our therapeutics, we can program how conserved regions are identified, validated, and targeted. Just last month, we announced Seek Labs received a $2 million award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA APHIS) to advance development of a mutation-resilient antiviral targeting HPAI.
At the same time, the durability-driven framework underlying PTAP is not limited to a single viral strain. Many viral pathogens evolve under similar pressures that enable them to evade strain-specific solutions. PTAP establishes a repeatable and scalable architecture that can be deployed across evolving viral threats.
There is no single tool that will eliminate HPAI and other viral pathogens. Vaccines, surveillance systems, biosecurity practices, and coordinated policy responses all remain critical components of disease control. But the continued persistence of HPAI underscores a broader lesson: rapidly evolving pathogens require solutions engineered with evolutionary pressure in mind from the very beginning.
The next generation of antiviral interventions will not be defined solely by how quickly they respond to change, but by how effectively they are built to adapt. At Seek Labs, PTAP represents our commitment to building that next generation of durable interventions.
Douglas Gladue, PhD is Vice President of Veterinary Pharmaceuticals at Seek Labs. As a globally recognized expert in virology and computational biology, he has more than 18 years of experience developing outbreak-response countermeasures across vaccines, antivirals, genomic surveillance, and high-containment research. With previous experience as a lead researcher at USDA Plum Island and in biotech, he specializes in translating pathogen genomics and computational approaches into practical tools for rapid response and animal health preparedness. Some of his previous work includes the development of leading African swine fever vaccine platforms, AI-enabled surveillance and strain-matching strategies, and international sequencing collaborations across Asia, Africa, and Europe. Dr. Gladue is the author of 140+ peer-reviewed publications, holds 10 patents, and is recipient of the Arthur S. Flemming Award.
