By Jared Bauer, CEO and Co-Founder, Seek Labs
In June of 2025, when we publicly announced BioSeeker, we closed with a belief that has shaped much of our work:
“The future of health isn’t something we wait for. It’s something we build. Together.”
At the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting this year, we took another step toward making that belief real.
That step represented roughly ten months of work with CGI’s team, and an idea that existed before our relationship began but did not yet have a path.
When promising science needs a path
There is a burden that comes with being able to see across nearly the entire landscape of infectious disease.
You begin to see possibilities in diseases that have received too little attention, in communities with limited resources, and in places where the need for a therapeutic has never been enough to justify the investment required to develop one.
The science may offer a starting point.
The economics may offer nowhere to go.
As BioSeeker expanded, that tension became harder for us to ignore. We were identifying opportunities beyond what Seek Labs could reasonably pursue through our own development programs. Some might support a commercial pathway. Others might never fit the financial requirements of a U.S. venture-backed company.
But the people affected by those diseases still need options.
Can we really sit on technology that could give people a chance at treatment simply because developing it does not make financial sense within our business model?
That question does not erase the cost of development or our responsibility to build a sustainable company. It asks us to think beyond the boundaries of what we can carry ourselves.
If we can identify a promising vulnerability and design a candidate intervention, how do we give that work a chance to move forward? Who could help move it? And how do we create a model in which contributing to neglected disease research also strengthens the technology behind it?
We had been asking those questions before CGI.
We needed help turning them into something we could do.
Turning a conviction into a commitment
Over the past ten months, CGI’s team worked closely with us to help shape that possibility into a Commitment to Action.
They invested time in understanding our technology, the opportunities it was creating, and the constraints we faced. Together, we worked through what Seek Labs could contribute, where outside expertise would be essential, and how collaboration could create value for everyone involved.
I am grateful for the seriousness they brought to that process.
An idea can be compelling and still remain an idea. Moving it into the world requires people willing to work through the details: scope, responsibilities, resources, partners, and what progress will actually look like.
CGI did that work with us.
They helped us develop a structure around a conviction we already held: that promising science should have a chance to move forward even when we cannot develop it ourselves.
By the time I stood on the main stage at the Annual Meeting, the commitment reflected months of shared effort.
Introducing Open Impact
Through CGI, we announced the Open Impact Sequence Ablation Therapeutics Program, a three-year Commitment to Action focused on neglected and underserved infectious diseases.
We have identified 11 diseases for the program and will begin with two.
Seek Labs will contribute BioSeeker-derived target intelligence, therapeutic designs, specificity analysis, and technical instructions. Research partners will conduct laboratory validation and help determine which programs warrant further development.
BioSeeker provides the intelligence behind that work, identifying disease-specific vulnerabilities at scale. Sequence Ablation Therapeutics, or SAT, is our programmable therapeutic modality designed to recognize and ablate specific genetic sequences a disease depends on.
At CGI, I shared early evidence from our African swine fever work, where treated animals showed a 57 percent survival rate compared with zero percent in controls. Those results are preclinical, and substantial development remains. But they are part of why we believe this approach deserves rigorous investigation across additional diseases.
Open Impact gives more researchers a place to begin that investigation.
A model built on shared learning
For this model to work, everyone involved has to get something meaningful from it.
Research institutions gain access to targets and therapeutic designs they can evaluate and potentially advance. Disease experts bring knowledge that can shape the science and its practical application. Seek Labs gains independent evidence about how our platform performs in different biological settings.
That evidence can tell us whether we identified the right vulnerability, whether a candidate behaved as expected, and where our assumptions failed. Each program can contribute to a better understanding of the platform behind it.
The more we learn, the better the platform can become. And the stronger the platform becomes, the more we can contribute. That gives us a reason and an ability to keep doing this.
The ultimate purpose, however, remains further down the road:
giving patients an option they do not have today.
From discovery to patients
A promising target is a beginning. Someone still has to cross the distance between that discovery and the person who needs treatment.
Laboratory validation, safety, delivery, manufacturing, regulatory review, and funding all sit along that path. So do the realities of the communities where a disease causes harm.
That is why the institutions closest to these diseases need to help shape the work early. They understand the local burden, the care available, the infrastructure that exists, and the conditions under which a therapeutic would need to function.
A university may establish the initial evidence. A government laboratory or disease-focused organization may help advance it. Philanthropic support may make development possible where commercial investment will not.
Open Impact does not solve every part of that journey.
It gives the science somewhere to go next.
And it begins building the relationships that will be required if a promising candidate is going to travel the much longer distance from discovery to a patient.
The responsibility ahead
On the CGI stage, I spoke about my son Oliver and the loss that led me to build Seek Labs. That history will always be part of this work.
But the responsibility has grown with what we are now able to see and design.
We cannot develop every opportunity. We cannot promise that every candidate will work. We can help ensure that more promising science has a path beyond our company, and that the limits of our commercial model do not automatically determine where the work ends.
CGI helped us turn that responsibility into a commitment we could act on.
Now we owe that commitment the same rigor we bring to the science: finding the right collaborators, generating evidence, learning from the results, and understanding what it will take to move successful programs closer to patients.
In June of 2025, we said we would not wait for the future of health to arrive. We would help build it.
Today, through Open Impact and our work with CGI, we are doing it.
Help move the work forward
Read more about the Open Impact Sequence Ablation Therapeutics Program.
Seek Labs is seeking research institutions, disease experts, governments, philanthropic organizations, and other mission-aligned partners interested in participating in Open Impact or helping expand the model to additional diseases and regions.
Interested organizations can contact Seek Labs here.
Sequence Ablation Therapeutics are investigational and have not been approved for human or veterinary use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture, or other regulatory authorities.