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SynBioBeta Speaker

Gary Abel

Fourth Eon Bio

Principal Scientist

Gary Abel is founder and principal scientist at Fourth Eon Bio, which is developing methods for adaptive biosecurity screening and function-based threat detection. He is also a contributing scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, supporting the Center’s work to understand and mitigate global biological risks from advanced AI. Previously he spent five years at Omniome and PacBio developing a DNA sequencing platform. His expertise spans biochemistry, molecular biophysics, and biosecurity, with nearly two decades studying how biomolecules behave and interact. Gary holds a BS in Physics from San Jose State University and a PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from the University of California Merced.

Sessions Featuring

Gary

This Year

Breakout Session

4:30 PM

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5:15 PM

Business of Biology

Synthesis Screening in the Age of Powerful AI

As AI reshapes what's possible in biology, biosecurity needs to keep up. Nucleic acid synthesis screening, which checks what's being ordered and by whom, is one of the field's most important lines of defense. But as AI capabilities advance, the screening infrastructure needs to evolve with them. This panel brings together leaders from the Sequence Biosecurity Risk Consortium, Fourth Eon Bio, SecureDNA, and BioTrust to discuss how sequence and customer screening are adapting to a new threat landscape.

Breakout Session

4:30 PM

-

5:15 PM

Business of Biology

Synthesis Screening in the Age of Powerful AI

As AI reshapes what's possible in biology, biosecurity needs to keep up. Nucleic acid synthesis screening, which checks what's being ordered and by whom, is one of the field's most important lines of defense. But as AI capabilities advance, the screening infrastructure needs to evolve with them. This panel brings together leaders from the Sequence Biosecurity Risk Consortium, Fourth Eon Bio, SecureDNA, and BioTrust to discuss how sequence and customer screening are adapting to a new threat landscape.

TBD

Session lineup still growing

Featuring

Speaker Coming Soon

Fireside Chat

12:00 AM

-

8:30 AM

Human Health

From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology

Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?

Featuring

Speaker Coming Soon

Previous Speakers Include