Our Story
An emergency-response laboratory that became an integrated analytical facility.
Founded in a pandemic
BioSeer was established in 2020 as a direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Selected to develop and lead the Northern Ireland Department of Health's SARS-CoV-2 wastewater surveillance programme, BioSeer pioneered wastewater and air pathogen surveillance in Northern Ireland.
At its peak, BioSeer was monitoring 32 wastewater treatment facilities up to four times per week, alongside various individual commercial and healthcare premises. We also expanded into air surveillance, monitoring pathogens across hospital wards, care homes and farms, and evaluating the performance of air filtration systems in healthcare settings.
A broader capability
The pandemic work revealed something important: the most useful answers to environmental, and public and animal health questions rarely come from a single scientific discipline. Environmental epidemiology works best when paired with genomics and environmental chemistry. Soil health is understood most deeply when chemistry and microbiology are applied together. Water quality requires both chemical and microbiological analysis to be meaningful.
That insight drove BioSeer to build an integrated laboratory — environmental chemistry, microbiology and genomics on the same bench, operated by the same team. The result is a facility capable of answering questions that single-discipline laboratories cannot.
Where we are
BioSeer is based in the David Keir Building on the Queen's University Belfast campus — giving the team direct access to research-grade infrastructure, a deep talent pool of scientific expertise, and a culture of rigorous, evidence-based science.
As a QUB spin-out, BioSeer combines the independence and responsiveness of a commercial laboratory with the scientific depth and collaborative network of one of the UK's leading research universities.