From Thai Farms to FAO Headquarters: A Global Year for Opendream's POOPS Project

Six cities. Six stages. One idea: stop waiting for outbreaks to announce themselves.

Over the past six months, Opendream carried our POOPS (Proactive One Health Outbreak Prevention System) project from Oxford to New Haven, Kuala Lumpur, Lisbon and Bishkek, and finally to FAO headquarters in Rome, where the project was selected for United Nations recognition. Here’s where we’ve been, and what we shared.

Bringing One Health to the World Stage at the Skoll World Forum

In April, Opendream took center stage at the renowned Skoll World Forum in Oxford, one of the world’s leading gatherings of social innovators and impact-driven leaders. Our Managing Director, Keng Susumpow, delivered a talk titled “Aligning Human, Animal, and Ecological Health Systems for Impact,” presenting how Opendream is advancing the One Health framework through the POOPS project. His presentation highlighted the project’s mission to protect ecosystems while strengthening human, animal, and community health outcomes — a vision that resonated strongly with the Forum’s global audience of changemakers.

Advancing Public Health Science at Yale School of Public Health

Across the Atlantic, Matt Parker brought Opendream’s work to one of America’s most respected academic institutions. He delivered a faculty seminar titled “Poonomics for Pandemics: Surveillance Innovation from Thailand,” tracing Opendream’s journey into wastewater epidemiology and metagenomics, and how that path led to the creation of the POOPS project. Matt also gave a guest lecture to Yale graduate students in the “Genomic Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases” course, offering a real-world look at the biosurveillance innovation happening in Southeast Asia.

Global Health Security 2026: Biosurveillance from Wildlife to H5N1

In June, Matt Parker joined the Global Health Security Conference 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, the field’s largest recurring gathering, which brought together more than 1,240 delegates from 88 countries at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. He spoke on the panel “One Health Biosurveillance: From Wildlife to H5N1,” describing how Opendream combines metagenomic sequencing with environmental surveillance in high-risk One Health settings to detect emerging health threats. With H5N1 circulating in new hosts and new geographies, the panel underlined a point central to Opendream’s work: surveillance that waits for clinical cases is surveillance that arrives late.

POOPS on Stage at the World One Health Congress in Lisbon

In September, POOPS traveled to Lisbon without us. At the 9th World One Health Congress — the field’s flagship global gathering, organized by the Global One Health Community — Juliana Gil of CZ Biohub San Francisco presented our research as part of a broader case for what happens when sequencing capacity is placed in local hands.

Biohub’s Rapid Response Team has spent years doing exactly that. Since 2017, the team has trained laboratories in more than 25 countries across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and South America to build and run their own metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) programs, pairing wet-lab protocols with the bioinformatics needed to turn raw reads into usable answers. Opendream is one of those recipients, and the POOPS metagenomic pipeline exists in its current form because of that training.

One Health in Central Asia: Regional Conference in Bishkek

Opendream joined the Second Regional Conference of the “One Health for Pandemic Prevention, Food System Resilience, and Ecosystem Health in Central Asia” program, held 14–15 September in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic. Co-hosted by the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic, the Regional Environmental Centre for Central Asia (CAREC), and the World Bank — together with the Quadripartite partners FAO, UNEP, WHO, and WOAH — the conference convened health, agriculture, and environment ministries from all five Central Asian countries, alongside national laboratories, academic researchers, and international agencies. During the Regional One Health Scientific Day on 15 September, Matt Parker presented “Metagenomics, Wastewater, and One Health,” sharing how POOPS could be replicated in the Central Asian context.

FAO Recognition in Rome

Also in September, POOPS was selected for recognition by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) at the FAO Global Conference for Actions on One Health in Agrifood Systems, held 21–23 September at FAO headquarters in Rome. The recognition program highlights good practices and outstanding innovations advancing the One Health approach across agrifood systems. Initiatives are assessed by an international panel of FAO-nominated experts on demonstrated impact, innovation and originality, inclusivity and social impact, scalability and replicability, and long-term sustainability.

About POOPS: From Reactive to Anticipatory Disease Surveillance

The POOPS project represents a fundamental rethinking of how the world monitors and responds to emerging health threats. Today’s disease surveillance systems are largely reactive: they wait for patients to fall ill, test only for known pathogens, and mobilize responses only after transmission is already underway. This approach creates dangerous gaps that delay detection, allow preventable spread, and cause significant mortality and economic shockwaves, particularly in under-resourced settings.

Over the past two years, Opendream has been developing and rigorously testing its molecular detection methodology in real-world field conditions. In a validation study across five farms in two Thai provinces, the POOPS metagenomic pipeline detected more than 500 virus species, with 91% of samples containing at least one priority pathogen. These results demonstrate the system’s ability to reliably detect high-risk viral signals even in complex, mixed environmental samples — a critical proof of concept for scaling the approach across the region.

A preprint of the experimental findings is available on bioRxiv.

The project is designed specifically for rural agricultural communities in Southeast Asia, where traditional surveillance infrastructure is limited but the risk of zoonotic spillover — the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans — is high.

About Opendream

Opendream is a technology and innovation organization dedicated to building open, human-centered solutions for global health and development challenges. Through projects like POOPS, Opendream is working to ensure that the communities most vulnerable to emerging health threats have access to the tools and intelligence they need to stay ahead of them.