{"id":244120,"date":"2026-09-16T22:05:37","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T03:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/software-rapidly-tracks-viral-variants-with-high-accuracy-to-aid-outbreak-responses"},"modified":"2026-09-16T22:05:37","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T03:05:37","slug":"software-rapidly-tracks-viral-variants-with-high-accuracy-to-aid-outbreak-responses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/software-rapidly-tracks-viral-variants-with-high-accuracy-to-aid-outbreak-responses","title":{"rendered":"Software rapidly tracks viral variants with high accuracy to aid outbreak responses"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

It was mid-2020, and Patrick Varilly, a software engineer and data scientist, was stuck at home, eager to help the world navigate the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. He reconnected with Pardis Sabeti, a core institute member of the Broad Institute who was at the forefront of analyzing how the SARS-CoV-2 virus was spreading, and with Ben Fry, her longstanding collaborator and principal at Fathom Information Design, a software firm known for tackling complex data problems. Varilly had worked closely with Sabeti and Fry at MIT more than 20 years earlier.<\/p>\n

At the time, Sabeti, Fry and their teams were studying thousands of SARS-CoV-2 genomes from COVID-19 patients to reconstruct the path of viral transmission<\/a> and identify which viral variants were emerging. Normally, retracing that path\u2014by mapping how different variants are genetically related to each other in what\u2019s called a phylogenetic tree\u2014takes a lot of time and computing power.<\/p>\n

Varilly, Sabeti and Fry saw an opportunity to accelerate the process while making data more accessible and easier to interpret. The result is Delphy, a new platform for rapid, interactive phylogenetic analysis. In a paper published<\/a> in Nature<\/i>, the researchers report how they rebuilt state-of-the-art phylogenetic tree models to make them faster, more efficient and scalable while maintaining the models\u2019 accuracy. Because Delphy runs entirely within a web browser, anyone with a laptop can perform these analyses without specialized training, software or computing infrastructure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was mid-2020, and Patrick Varilly, a software engineer and data scientist, was stuck at home, eager to help the world navigate the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. He reconnected with Pardis Sabeti, a core institute member of the Broad Institute who was at the forefront of analyzing how the SARS-CoV-2 virus was spreading, and with Ben [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,412,1965],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-genetics","category-mapping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}