Biosecurity leaders gathered at Stanford this week to offer new ideas and perspectives on a wide range of issues critical to societal health.

The conference, “Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity,” began Sept. 13 with a trip to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the East Bay. The second day featured a series of panel discussions on the Stanford campus. The fellows, chosen by the UPMC Center for Health Security, hailed from a wide array of backgrounds, including biological science, medicine, policy, the military, law, public health and the private sector.

Biosecurity and its relationship to global health is a key issue for Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), which hosted and helped organize the conference along with the sponsoring UPMC Center. The conference was sponsored by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the emerging leaders program run by the UPMC. 

With rapid advances in technology and science, biosecurity is increasingly focused on how harmful biological agents could become national security threats and risks.

‘A changing world’

David Relman, co-director of CISAC, addressed the fellows on Wednesday with remarks on the origins of CISAC’s involvement in biosecurity. Relman, a professor in the departments of medicine, and microbiology and immunology, later served as a panelist in a discussion on biosecurity and national and international policy.

Megan Palmer, a fellow and CISAC senior research scholar on biosecurity, panel moderator and organizer of the conference, described the program as one that “brings together some of the most talented and committed rising leaders from multiple organizations and disciplines critical to national and international biosecurity.”

She noted, “Stanford's biosecurity programs are focused on developing strategies for biosecurity in a changing world. Today we face complex biosecurity challenging ranging from emerging infectious diseases, intentional misuse of biotechnology, and potential accidents and unintentional consequences of our increasing ability to manipulate living systems.”

At the same time, biotechnology continues to be an important and growing part of the global economy, Palmer said. “Our scholarship and engagement work seeks to developing new ways to think about and act in this changing environment.”

Research focus

Through the “emerging leaders” program, fellows deepen their expertise in biosecurity, build leadership skills, and forge networks of lasting professional relationships, she added.

The two-day conference included talks on threat awareness, biodetection, a “viral storm” exercise, bioengineering research, computational biology and national security, biosecurity and national and international policy, the evolving biotechnology field, among other topics.

Stanford participants and speakers included CISAC’s William Perry, the former secretary of defense; Drew Endy, a Stanford associate professor of bioengineering; Tim Stearns, chair of the biology department; Milana Trounce, clinical associate professor of emergency medicine; and Manu Prakash, assistant professor of bioengineering.

CISAC activity in biosecurity includes research on:

• Risks in misusing the emerging life sciences;
• Social and political factors behind drug-resistant antibiotics, leading to an tight pipeline for new drugs;
• Examining the ethical responsibilities of scientists in this field and the needs for regulation;
• Anticipating and pre-empting the misuse of biotechnology by people with the intent to do harm.

Matthew Watson, a senior analyst for the UPMC Center, said, “It is difficult to imagine a more fitting venue for the fall Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity workshop than Stanford. Few institutions can bring together this array of world class talent, including leaders from national security, the life sciences, and the private sector.”

Back in February, the UPMC Center for Health Security chose its 2016 fellows and launched the program with a Washington, D.C. workshop in March.

The H5N1 strain of the bird flu is a deadly virus that kills more than half of the people who catch it.

Fortunately, it’s not easily spread from person to person, and is usually contracted though close contact with infected birds.

But scientists in the Netherlands have genetically engineered a much more contagious airborne version of the virus that quickly spread among the ferrets they use as an experimental model for how the disease might be transmitted among humans.

And researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison used samples from the corpses of birds frozen in the Arctic to recreate a version of the virus similar to the one that killed an estimated 40 million people in the 1918 flu pandemic.

It’s experiments like these that make David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist and co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, say it's time to create a better system for oversight of risky research before a man-made super virus escapes from the lab and causes the next global pandemic.

“The stakes are the health and welfare of much of the earth’s ecosystem,” said Relman.

“We need greater awareness of risk and a greater number of different kinds of tools for regulating the few experiments that are going to pose major risks to large populations of humans and animals and plants.”

Terrorists, rogue states or conventional military powers could also use the published results of experiments like these to create a deadly bioweapon.

“This is an issue of biosecurity, not just biosafety,” he said.

“It’s not simply the production of a new infectious agent, it’s the production of a blueprint for a new infectious agent that’s just as risky as the agent itself.”

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But Relman cited a series of recent lapses at laboratories in the United States as evidence that accidents can and do happen.

“There have been a frightening number of accidents at the best laboratories in the United States with mishandling and escape of dangerous pathogens,” Relman said.

“There is no laboratory, there is no investigator, there is no system that is foolproof, and our best laboratories are not as safe as one would have thought.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) admitted last year that it had mishandled samples of Ebola during the recent outbreak, potentially exposing lab workers to the deadly disease.

In the same year, a CDC lab accidentally contaminated a mild strain of the bird flu virus with deadly H5N1 and mailed it to unsuspecting researchers.

And a 60 year-old vial of smallpox (the contagious virus that was effectively eradicated by a worldwide vaccination program) was discovered sitting in an unused storage room at a U.S. Food and Drug Administration lab.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Army accidentally shipped samples of live anthrax to hundreds of labs around the world.

Similar problems have been reported in labs around the world. The United Kingdom has had more than 100 mishaps in its high-containment labs in recent years.

It’s difficult to judge the full scope of the problem, because many lab accidents are underreported.

Studying viruses in the lab does bring important potential benefits, such as the promise of universal vaccines, as well as cheap and effective ways of developing new drugs and other kinds of alternative defenses against naturally occurring diseases.

“It’s a very tricky balancing act,” Relman said.

“We don’t want to simply shut down the work or impede it unnecessarily.”

However, there are safer ways to conduct research, such as using harmless “avirulent” versions of the virus that would not cause widespread death and injury if it infected the general public, Relman said.

Developing better tools for risk-benefit analysis to identify and mitigate potential dangers in the early stages of research would be another important step towards making biological experiments safer.

Closer cooperation among diverse stakeholders (including domain experts, government agencies, funding groups, governing organizations of scientists and the general public) is also needed in order to develop effective rules for oversight and regulation of dangerous experiments, both domestically and abroad.

“We believe that the solutions are going to have to involve a diverse group of actors that has not yet been brought together,” Relman said.

“We need new approaches for governance in the life sciences that allow for these kinds of considerations across the science community and the policy community.”

You can read more about Relman’s views on how to limit the risks of biological engineering in this article he wrote for Foreign Affairs with co-author with Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics.