¶ BlueDot
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BlueDot Inc. (formerly Bio.Diaspora) is a private Canadian artificial intelligence software company based in Toronto, Ontario.[1] It is intended to operate as an early warning system for emerging infectious diseases across the globe.
BlueDot is notable in the COVID-19 pandemic due to its role in detecting the initial outbreak of an “undiagnosed pneumonia” in Wuhan, China.
¶ History
The company was founded in 2008 under the project name Bio.Diaspora by Dr. Kamran Khan, a professor at the University of Toronto and infectious disease specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital.[2] Initial development took place in collaboration with the Centre for Research on Inner City Health, Ryerson University, the University of Manitoba and the world’s largest commercial airport and air transport organizations.[3]
Khan cites the SARS outbreak of 2003 and its detrimental effects on the City of Toronto as the primary motivation for the creation of Bio.Diaspora. The company is said to have “attracted interest from public health, biodefense and industry groups worldwide, all of which are looking for real-time, global epidemic intelligence to protect their interests.”[4]
Bio.Diaspora produced a report in 2009 titled “An Analysis of Canada’s Vulnerability to Emerging Infectious Disease Threats via the Global Airline Transportation Network”. Funding was provided by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).[5]
In June 2011, St. Michael’s Hospital brought Bio.Diaspora to MaRS Innovation for market potential evaluation.[4:1] By 2011, Bio.Diaspora had helped countries anticipate and react to the spread of disease at mass gatherings such as the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, Canada and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, England, the FIFA World Cup, and the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.[3:1]
Bio.Diaspora partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Harvard University to integrate the program with HealthMap, a technology that monitors public websites and global online media for news of emerging diseases.
¶ Relaunch
Bio.Diaspora was relaunched as BlueDot in 2013.[6] After Ebola spread across Africa in 2014, the company predicted its migration out of West Africa and published its results in the Lancet.[7][8] BlueDot then reportedly predicted a Zika outbreak in Florida six months before it occurred.[2:1][9]
The company secured funding from Horizons Ventures in a Series A round in 2015.[10] This was followed by an additional $9.4 million in 2019, with its primary investors being Horizon Ventures, The Co-operators, and BDC Capital's Women in Technology Venture Fund.[11]
¶ COVID-19
According to BlueDot, the company was the first in the world to detect the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, China. It sent an alert to its customers on December 31, 2019, and used data on airline tickets to accurately predict the virus' apparent travel to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo.[12] This came six days before the World Health Organization sent out their own public warning.[2:2]
In January 2020, a team led by Isaac Bogoch published a rapid communication titled "Pneumonia of unknown aetiology in Wuhan, China: potential for international spread via commercial air travel" with the BlueDot team. The paper was submitted to the Journal of Travel Medicine on January 8, 2020, revised January 9, and accepted January 10.[13]
On March 23, 2020, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that it had contracted BlueDot through the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) for COVID-19 modelling and monitoring.[2:3][14]
California Governor Gavin Newsom praised BlueDot as “an incredible company that came in, looking with AI and big data to analyze travel patterns… We’re not looking again at the aggregate of our healthcare delivery system but where we’ll be stretched, by ZIP code.”[15]
In May 2022, it was revealed that BlueDot had used Canadian citizens' cell phone data accessed under direction from PHAC to view a detailed snapshot of people's behaviour, including visits to the grocery store, gatherings with family and friends, time spent at home and trips to other towns and provinces.[16][17]
¶ Organization
| Name | Position | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Kamran Khan | Founder[2:4] | St. Michael's Hospital, University of Toronto |
| Alexander Watts | Employee | - |
| Andrea Thomas-Bachli | Employee | - |
| Carmen Huber | Employee | - |
| Isaac Bogoch | Consultant | Member of the Modelling Consensus Table of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table |
¶ Investors
Investors in BlueDot include:[18]
- BDC Capital
- The Co-operators
- Golden Ventures
- Horizons Ventures[19]
- Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI)
¶ Clients
BlueDot's clients include:[15:1]
- Air Canada
- City of Chicago
- Greater Toronto Airport Authority (GTAA)
- Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)[2:5]
- Taiwan Centers for Disease Control
¶ Patents
- April 2, 2008: System and method to predict the global spread of infectious agents via commercial air travel
- February 13, 2012: Warning system for infectious diseases and method therefor
- March 1, 2017: Systems and methods for metagenomic analysis
- June 21, 2017: Systems and methods for identification of nucleic acids in a sample
¶ External links
Vendeville, G. (2020, March 27). U of T infectious disease expert’s AI firm now part of Canada’s COVID-19 arsenal. University of Toronto News. http://archive.today/2022.02.24-074016/https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-infectious-disease-expert-s-ai-firm-now-part-canada-s-covid-19-arsenal ↩︎
The first company to identify the coronavirus outbreak – Bluedot. (2020, June 23). Bayslope. http://archive.today/2022.02.24-082245/https://bayslope.com/the-first-company-to-identify-the-coronavirus-outbreak-bluedot/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Impact Report 2010/2011. (2011). Centre for Research on Inner City Health; St. Michael’s Hospital. https://web.archive.org/web/20130721142723/http://www.stmichaelshospital.com:80/pdf/crich/crich-impact-report-2010-11.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
Bio.Diaspora: Preventing the next pandemic. (2011, November 24). MaRS Discovery District. http://archive.today/2022.02.24-214313/https://www.marsdd.com/news/bio-diaspora-preventing-the-next-pandemic/ ↩︎ ↩︎
An Analysis of Canada’s Vulnerability to Emerging Infectious Disease Threats via the Global Airline Transportation Network. (2009). The Centre for Research on Inner City Health; St. Michael’s Hospital. https://web.archive.org/web/20230919164806/https://paulojraposo.github.io/assets/biodiasporareport2009_lowres.pdf ↩︎
Allen, K. (2016, February 22). How a Toronto company used big data to predict the spread of Zika. Toronto Star. https://web.archive.org/web/20230919190717/https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/how-a-toronto-company-used-big-data-to-predict-the-spread-of-zika/article_dfa274ae-659a-5496-bdd6-ae22fe0561cd.html ↩︎
Ogola, W. (2021, January 13). How AI predicted the Coronavirus Outbreak. Engineering Education (EngEd) Program; Section. http://archive.today/2022.02.24-183853/https://www.section.io/engineering-education/how-ai-predicted-the-coronavirus-outbreak/ ↩︎
Bogoch, I. I., Brady, O. J., Kraemer, M. U. G., German, M., Creatore, M. I., Kulkarni, M. A., Brownstein, J. S., Mekaru, S. R., Hay, S. I., Groot, E., Watts, A., & Khan, K. (2016). Anticipating the international spread of Zika virus from Brazil. The Lancet, 387(10016), 335–336. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(16)00080-5 ↩︎
Who We Are. BlueDot. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230712203019/https://bluedot.global/press/ ↩︎
BlueDot profiled in Toronto Star for anticipating Zika virus spread. (2016, February 22). Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners. https://archive.ph/2023.09.19-190545/https://tiap.ca/2016/02/bluedot-profiled-in-toronto-star-for-anticipating-zika-virus-spread/ ↩︎
Stieg, C. (2020, March 3). How this Canadian start-up spotted coronavirus before everyone else knew about it. CNBC. https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185449/https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/03/bluedot-used-artificial-intelligence-to-predict-coronavirus-spread.html ↩︎
Niiler, E. (2020, January 25). An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus. Wired. http://archive.today/2021.07.12-110940/https://www.wired.com/story/ai-epidemiologist-wuhan-public-health-warnings/ ↩︎
Bogoch, I. I., Watts, A., Thomas-Bachli, A., Huber, C., Kraemer, M. U. G., & Khan, K. (2020). Pneumonia of Unknown Etiology in Wuhan, China: Potential for International Spread Via Commercial Air Travel. Journal of Travel Medicine, 27(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/jtm/taaa008 ↩︎
Canada’s plan to mobilize science to fight COVID-19. (2020). Prime Minister of Canada. http://archive.today/2022.02.24-201446/https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2020/03/23/canadas-plan-mobilize-science-fight-covid-19 ↩︎
Our Clients | BlueDot Case Studies. BlueDot. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from http://archive.today/2022.02.24-184125/https://bluedot.global/clients/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Woolf, M. (2022, May 5). Canadians’ trips to liquor stores, pharmacies tracked via phones during pandemic. CP24. http://archive.today/2022.05.06-055451/https://www.cp24.com/news/canadians-trips-to-liquor-stores-pharmacies-tracked-via-phones-during-pandemic-1.5890349 ↩︎
Kelly, P. (2022). Collection and use of mobility data by the Government of Canada and related issues. House of Commons Canada. https://web.archive.org/web/20220726004633/https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/ETHI/Reports/RP11736929/ethirp04/ethirp04-e.pdf ↩︎
BlueDot Company Profile: Valuation & Investors. Pitchbook. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from http://archive.today/2022.02.24-080720/https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/100148-32%23timeline ↩︎
Portfolio. Horizons Ventures. Retrieved January 18, 2022, from https://web.archive.org/web/20220118072349/https://www.horizonsventures.com/portfolio/ ↩︎