Biosecurity Assessments for Emerging Transdisciplinary Biotechnologies: Revisiting Biodefense in an Age of Synthetic Biology.

Introduction: Rapid advances in biotechnologies and transdisciplinary research are enhancing the ability to perform full-scale engineering of biology, contributing to worldwide efforts to create bioengineered plants, medicines, and commodities, which promise sustainability and innovative properties.

Objective: This rapidly evolving biotechnology landscape is prompting focused scrutiny on biosecurity frameworks in place to mitigate harmful exploitation of biotechnology by state and non-state actors. Concerns about biosafety and biosecurity of engineering biology research have existed for decades as views about how advances in this and associated fields might provide new capabilities to malicious actors.

Precision medicine, agriculture, and genome editing: science and ethics.

The era of precision medicine has generated advances in various fields of science and medicine with the potential for a paradigm shift in healthcare delivery that will ultimately lead to an individualized approach to medicine. Such timely topics were explored in 2018 at a workshop held at the Third International Conference on One Medicine One Science (iCOMOS), in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A broad range of scientists and regulatory experts provided detailed insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with precision medicine and gene editing.

Policy and Science for Global Health Security: Shaping the Course of International Health.

The global burden of infectious diseases and the increased attention to natural, accidental, and deliberate biological threats has resulted in significant investment in infectious disease research. Translating the results of these studies to inform prevention, detection, and response efforts often can be challenging, especially if prior relationships and communications have not been established with decision-makers. Whatever scientific information is shared with decision-makers before, during, and after public health emergencies is highly dependent on the individuals or organizations who are communicating with policy-makers.

National and Transnational Security Implications of Asymmetric Access to and Use of Biological Data.

Biology and biotechnology have changed dramatically during the past 20 years, in part because of increases in computational capabilities and use of engineering principles to study biology. The advances in supercomputing, data storage capacity, and cloud platforms enable scientists throughout the world to generate, analyze, share, and store vast amounts of data, some of which are biological and much of which may be used to understand the human condition, agricultural systems, evolution, and environmental ecosystems. These advances and applications have enabled: (1) the emergence of data science, which involves the development of new algorithms to analyze and visualize data; and (2) the use of engineering approaches to manipulate or create new biological organisms that have specific functions, such as production of industrial chemical precursors and development of environmental bio-based sensors.