What is Biosecurity — Explained

Since the emergence of the term in the late 20th century, “biosecurity” has had a wide variety of meanings. Stakeholders in agriculture, defense, public health, and other sectors understand the term in the context of their own work and the goals of their field. While biosecurity is fundamental to the work of NTI | bio, we have not explicitly laid out our definition of biosecurity — until now.

A Brief History of Biosecurity

Throughout most of the 20th century, there was no concerted set of activities labeled biosecurity. Instead, national and international activities emphasized state-controlled biological weapons, either by preventing their use or preparing countermeasures against their effects. At the international level, the Biological Weapons Convention entered into force in 1975, prohibiting not just the use, but also the production, acquisition, and stockpiling of biological weapons by member states. Nationally, biosecurity fell largely within the realm of defense ministries, including those in the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union, which conducted defensive research on specific pathogens.

Oversight of institutions outside government was slow to emerge, with cursory efforts emerging in the United States in the mid-1990s. This changed in 2001, when anthrax attacks in the United States sparked widespread concern about biosecurity in the West, and prompted a massive restructuring of the U.S. Select Agent Program. The program, which named specific biological agents deemed particularly risky, was expanded to regulate all “possession, use, and transfer of select agents.”

According to NTI

We define biosecurity as: policies and practices that protect against the deliberate misuse of biology to cause harm.

This is designed to encompass a wide range of potential threats, and to be responsive to emerging technologies. While this responsiveness to technological advances is particularly modern, use of the term biosecurity in any context has only come about in the past four decades.

Important to note, this definition does not include accidental misuse, which we define as biosafety.

 There Are Many Definitions

One of the first definitions came from the agricultural sector in the 1980s and is represented by the Food and Agriculture Organization today as an approach for “analysing and managing relevant risks to human, animal and plant life and health, and associated risks to the environment.” It has been widely adopted by national and international organizations as part of the One Health framework and is the predominant definition in many parts of the world, especially those with strong agricultural sectors and a high threat of naturally emerging infectious diseases, such as Southeast Asia.

The term “laboratory biosecurity,” first advanced by the World Health Organization in 2006, encompasses the “protection, control, and accountability for valuable biological materials within laboratories.” Resources related to this definition place a heavy emphasis on the human element and hardening laboratories against malicious actors. WHO was also among the first to define the related term “dual-use,” describing how biological research often has both civilian and military applications. The potential positive impacts of dual-use research make simply banning it undesirable, while the potential negative impacts require strong biosecurity measures to reduce risks.

While each of these definitions remains relevant and valuable to the organizations that adhere to it, they also fail to capture the full range of key considerations that NTI | bio engages with in our work. Specifically, we believe that advances in bioscience and biotechnology are lowering the bar for engineering biological systems and synthesizing novel ones. To effectively guard against rapidly evolving biological risks, our definition must also address these advances, as well as others currently unforeseen.

Impact of Technological Advances

Synthetic biology—the application of engineering methods to program biology, up to and including the creation of entirely new cells—has existed since at least the 1970s, but its methods required significant expertise and effort. However, in 2012, the publication of the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technique revolutionized the discipline. Using CRISPR, it became easier than ever to cut, paste, add, and delete DNA sequences, increasing the feasibility of creating novel pathogens. Widespread adoption of the technique in the past decade is one of many developments causing the biosecurity community to consider risk reduction measures beyond narrowly targeted lists of specifically named pathogens.

As the pace of technological advancements increases and their impact on the life sciences continues to grow, NTI | bio recognizes the need to use a definition of biosecurity that incorporates these developments. The definition of biosecurity described above allows for responses to emerging biological threats that are both flexible and robust. In the past two years, this approach has allowed us to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into our considerations of the biological risk landscape. The emergence of AI biodesign tools, along with other AIxBio capabilities, is accelerating an ongoing revolution in bioscience and biotechnology and we believe developing effective safeguards against the misuse of such technology is vitally important.

You can read more about NTI | bio’s work here.