Securing the Biotechnology Frontier: Three Targeted Technical Interventions to Strengthen US Biodefense in the Post-Pandemic Era

While the COVID-19 pandemic initially brought the extreme human and economic costs of natural infectious diseases to the public’s attention, the ongoing lab leak debate has shifted the focus to an equally concerning threat: the possibility of engineered pandemics. Rapid advancements in biotechnologies have democratized capabilities once limited to high-resourced laboratories, creating an urgent need for governance frameworks that balance competitive innovation with strong national and global biosecurity. As technological advances continue to outpace regulatory oversight, the post-pandemic world faces a critical inflection point where our choices about biosecurity governance will shape our defences against future threats and our ability to harness biotechnology’s life-saving potential.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered attitudes toward biological research governance. While determining the origins of SARS-CoV-2 remains important, the central debate often misses a more crucial point: the mere possibility of a laboratory release, regardless of whether it occurred in this instance, reveals critical vulnerabilities in our biosecurity and biosafety systems.

This policy brief proposes three targeted technical interventions to strengthen America’s resilience to biological threats and safely develop and deploy cutting-edge biotechnologies:

1. Enhance DNA Synthesis Screening and Verification: Strengthen and build upon existing frameworks to establish comprehensive federal screening requirements for all DNA synthesis orders to prevent misuse of this critical technology.

2. Advance Pathogen Early Warning Systems: Deploy cutting-edge surveillance technologies and unified data platforms that can detect emerging biological threats earlier and more reliably than current systems.

3. Improve Genetic Engineering Detection and Attribution Capabilities: Develop technical forensic capabilities to determine if pathogens have been engineered and potentially trace them to specific laboratories.

These technical interventions would collectively strengthen America’s biodefense capabilities to prevent, detect, and attribute biological threats, creating a defense against natural outbreaks and engineered pathogens. By investing in these critical technologies, the United States can establish global technical standards, create new high-value industries, and ensure that biotechnology’s transformative potential benefits humanity rather than threatening it.