On 1 December 2025, the Asia Pathogen Genomics Initiative (Asia PGI) unveiled the first public preview of PathGen in Singapore - a sovereign-by-design platform that brings pathogen genomics and real-world contextual data together to deliver fast, trusted outbreak intelligence.
For IXO, it marks a major milestone in our decade-long effort to turn complex, distributed data into actionable insight while preserving national control, work that now supports the urgent realities of 21st-century infectious disease threats.
What PathGen is solving for
Today, public health teams face a difficult paradox.
On one hand, Next-Generation Sequencing and pathogen genomics now allow us to see the “who, where, and how” of infections in unprecedented detail. On the other, those insights are often trapped in silos:
- Data resides in non-interoperable systems.
- Critical contextual information – clinical signals, mobility, demographics, environmental exposures, wastewater signals, health system capacity – is fragmented or missing.
- Concerns around data sovereignty, privacy, and policy constraints make cross-border sharing slow and difficult.
The result is that decisions about treatment protocols, vaccine deployment, or vector control are often made with incomplete, delayed information, even when the raw data exists.
PathGen has been designed to change this.
As presented at the preview event, the platform integrates pathogen genomic data with diverse contextual datasets and uses advanced AI, including foundation models, to surface high-quality, timely insights for:
- Earlier detection of emerging disease threats
- Faster risk assessment and scenario analysis
- More coordinated responses within and across borders
Crucially, PathGen is architected as a federated, sovereign-by-design system. Countries retain control of their raw data; what is shared are the analytics and insights needed for joint decision-making. This is fundamental to building the trust required for long-term regional cooperation.
How IXO is contributing
IXO is PathGen’s data and AI software engineering partner, and a research collaborator with the DukeNUS Global Health Institute. Our role is to design and build the platform’s intelligence and data layers so that it can:
- Respect and enforce national data sovereignty
- Operate across heterogeneous data sources and systems
- Make AI-assisted decisions secure, explainable, and accountable
From an engineering standpoint, that translates into several core responsibilities.
Federated, sovereign-by-design data infrastructure
PathGen is being built so that raw data – genomic, clinical, environmental, mobility, and others – remains within national or institutional boundaries. Instead of centralising everything, analytics services are deployed close to the data, and only the minimal, necessary insights are shared across the network.
IXO’s decentralised data and verifiable claims technologies are being adapted to:
- Represent complex data-sharing agreements as machine-readable policies
- Apply cryptographic proofs so that consuming parties can trust the integrity and provenance of shared analytics, without needing direct access to underlying raw data
- Integrate with diverse national systems and laboratories while maintaining a common interoperability layer
This approach allows PathGen to function as a regional intelligence layer without becoming a centralised data repository.
Agentic AI and decision support
PathGen is not just a data integration exercise. It must help answer urgent, real questions for public health teams, such as:
- Is a detected cluster likely to represent a new variant or a flare of a known pathogen?
- Where should limited sequencing capacity be focused next week or next month?
- How should vaccination, treatment, or vector control strategies adapt as conditions change?
IXO is bringing its experience with agentic AI – orchestrated systems of AI agents that can reason, query, and synthesise across multiple data streams – into the PathGen stack. This includes:
- Multi-source sense-making over genomic, clinical, population, environmental, and mobility data
- Scenario analysis and forecasting that make assumptions and uncertainties explicit
- Decision-support interfaces that emphasise explainability and traceability, rather than opaque predictions
The goal is to augment, not replace, the expertise of public health practitioners, laboratory scientists, policymakers, and clinicians, giving them a clearer, more timely picture on which to act.
Governance, auditability, and benefit-sharing
Trust in an intelligence platform is not only technical; it is institutional.
IXO’s work on governance frameworks and verifiable impact systems is informing how PathGen will:
- Encode data access rules, use restrictions, and consent frameworks into enforceable, auditable policies
- Provide end-to-end traceability of who accessed which analytics, under what authorisation, and for which purpose
- Support benefit-sharing arrangements so that contributions of data, analytics, and operational capacity can be recognised within agreed governance models
This is central to PathGen’s positioning as a shared public good for the region, not a proprietary product.
A cooperative initiative
Although IXO holds a central role in building the AI and data infrastructure, PathGen is inherently collaborative.
- Asia PGI, led by the Duke-NUS Centre for Outbreak Preparedness, provides the regional backbone – convening more than 50 government and academic partners across around 15 countries, and aligning PathGen with a broader roadmap for pathogen genomics and infectious disease control in Asia.
- Three catalytic funding partners – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Temasek Foundation, and Philanthropy Asia Alliance – are enabling PathGen to be developed as a long-term, Asia-led, sovereign-by-design platform rather than a single-country or single-vendor solution.
- Technical collaborators – Amazon Web Services (AWS) Health Omics, Sequentia Biotech, and the University of Sydney – are contributing core capabilities in cloud infrastructure, genomics, and data science that make a federated, AI-enabled platform feasible and scalable.
- Country partners from across the Asia PGI network, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, are co-creating the platform. Their engagement is shaping the governance, deployment models, and initial use cases so that PathGen meets real operational needs in public health systems.
CNA
CNA (Channel NewsAsia), Singapore’s national news broadcaster, covered the PathGen preview in this segment.
The preview event in Singapore brought these communities together – public health leaders, scientists, engineers, policymakers, and philanthropic partners – to align on strategy, governance, and the next steps for regional deployment.
“As PathGen’s data and AI software engineering partner, IXO is building this next-generation infectious disease intelligence platform to be sovereign-by-design, keep data local, and make AI-assisted decisions secure, explainable, and accountable.” — Dr Shaun Conway (IXO founder, CEO, and co-principal investigator for PathGen)
This reflects a broader commitment that runs through all of IXO’s work: combining advanced AI with strong governance, cryptographic assurance, and respect for sovereignty to enable better, fairer decisions at scale.
Moving from preview to deployments
Following the preview, PathGen will move from proof-of-concept to a launch-ready platform over the next 18 months, with pilots from early 2026 and a staged regional rollout through 2027.
Initial applications are expected to focus on:
- Tuberculosis, including drug-resistant forms, where genomics and contextual data can help detect emerging clusters earlier and align treatment with resistance patterns
- Arboviral diseases such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, by combining viral trends with climate and mobility data for better forecasting and targeting of vaccination and vector control
- Wastewater and environmental surveillance, converting early signals into actionable public health warnings
In parallel, Asia PGI and its partners will continue in-country engagements to define priorities, refine technical requirements, design governance and benefit-sharing frameworks, and build capacity in public health laboratories and implementation teams.
Our commitment
PathGen represents a significant step in applying IXO’s technologies and experience to one of the most critical challenges in global health: reducing the time between detecting a threat and acting decisively to contain it, while strengthening trust and sovereignty rather than weakening them.
We are honoured to serve as the AI and data engineering partner in this Asia-led initiative and deeply grateful to our collaborators at Duke-NUS and Asia PGI, the funding partners, the technical partners, and the many country teams who are shaping PathGen into a shared public good for health security.
For IXO, PathGen is not just another platform. It is a concrete demonstration of how sovereign, verifiable, AI-assisted intelligence systems can be built with and for the communities that depend on them – starting in Asia, with implications for the world.
At the cutting-edge of preventing, detecting, and responding to infectious diseases.
