A physical biological sample takes hours to cross a border, while the genomic data derived from it crosses in milliseconds. That difference is the single greatest asset in pandemic preparedness, and it is routinely spent on nothing. A system moves at the pace of its slowest step, and the slowest step in biosurveillance has never been the sensing technology. It is a legal conversation measured in weeks, sitting downstream of a pipe that moves in thousandths of a second.
Robert Morfino has spent more than seven years in biosecurity strategy, leading international partnerships at Ginkgo Biosecurity and now driving business development at Verily. He has also designed programs including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Traveler Genomic Surveillance program and the United Kingdom Health Security Agency (UKHSA) national biosurveillance network, experiences that taught him where the real constraint lives. “Data sharing architecture is just as critical as the sensing technology itself,” he says. Before genomic data leaves a jurisdiction, four questions need answers, and the time to answer them is now, while nobody is sick.
What Decision Does This Data Enable?
The first question concerns output rather than input. A surveillance program that cannot name the decision its data will trigger is a very expensive way to accumulate files. “Collecting genomic data without a direct line to response measures only creates noise, not security,” Morfino says. Defining the required public health output at the start dictates the entire technical architecture, and it separates programs that deliver actionable intelligence for immediate intervention from programs that collect data for its own sake. A system built without a named decision at the end still produces results. Nobody will know what to do with them.
Who Benefits From the Discovery?
The second question treats fairness as an engineering requirement. Reciprocity is the foundation of network coverage, and countries contributing biological samples reasonably expect access to the resulting data, the analytical tools, and the eventual countermeasures.
The practical stakes run deeper than diplomacy. A surveillance network depends on voluntary contribution from the jurisdictions where new pathogens actually emerge, so a program that takes samples and returns nothing is dismantling its own sensor grid by one offended partner at a time. Writing equitable access into the initial contract turns transactional data collection into sustainable long-term participation.
Is Governance Settled Before the Emergency?
The most resilient programs settle their legal frameworks, technical standards, and escalation paths during peacetime, and Morfino’s reasoning here is the sharpest in his framework. “When an outbreak occurs, the first week should be dedicated entirely to executing science and not negotiating terms of use,” he says.
An emergency never accelerates a legal negotiation. Rising stakes make every party more careful about what they sign, and lawyers do not get faster because a pathogen is moving. The week a crisis spends resolving data sovereignty is a week the virus spends compounding, and only one of those two parties benefits from the delay.
Can the Platform Actually Execute?
The fourth question, and in Morfino’s opinion the most critical, asks whether the digital platform can deliver what the policy promises. “Policy frameworks are only as effective as the technical engine driving them,” he says. The platform has to handle the entire operational stack, embedding access governance into the system, removing friction from sharing, maintaining high data quality, and offering curated pipelines for standardized analysis.
“Without that digital foundation, policy agreements stay on paper,” Morfino says. An agreement permitting millisecond exchange delivers hours-long exchange the moment it depends on manual coordination, at which point the genomic data has surrendered its only advantage over the sample in the cargo hold.
Building resilient biosurveillance is an architectural challenge before it is a biological one. The data can already outrun the pathogen. Whether it succeeds in this task is decided in conference rooms, years before the outbreak, by whoever asked these four questions while there was time to answer them. To learn more about biosurveillance infrastructure and cross-border data partnerships, connect with Robert Morfino on LinkedIn.
