Biosurveillance, rapid countermeasures, resilient supply chains, and DNA screening: securing biology as it becomes easy to engineer.

The tools to design a protein, order the DNA, and express it have never been cheaper or more accessible. The systems meant to check that work were built for a slower, smaller, more centralized field. Washington has started closing the distance, through the NSCEB, the BIOSECURE Act, the COINS Act, and a growing biotechnology mandate inside the Department of War and DARPA, but the distance is still there.

The same gap exists in manufacturing. Roughly 10% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in American medicines are produced domestically, most key starting materials are sole-sourced overseas, and the precursor chemistry sits further offshore still. A country that cannot make its own medicines has limited options in a crisis, regardless of how good its science is.

What follows from both gaps is a set of hard problems. Rebuilding enough domestic capacity to matter. Identifying a threat before it spreads, whether it emerges in a person, an animal, or a field. Compressing the time between a novel pathogen and a working countermeasure. And confronting the reality that the ability to design proteins, DNA, and RNA is becoming broadly accessible, for beneficial and malicious purposes alike.

The BioDefense & BioSecurity track convenes leaders from policy, government, and industry working at these frontiers to address how to maintain safety while accelerating the biotechnology future.