The Future of Synthetic Biology, Pandemics, and their Impact on Economies and National Security

Transcript

ladies and gentlemen good evening my name is duncan brown and i'm a trustee with the baltimore council on foreign affairs i hope this webinar finds all of those tuned in safe and well before i introduce dr tara o'toole from inquitel a few quick announcements our next webinar we are taking the month of august off will be on september 24th when dean cheng from the heritage foundation will be with us to discuss china specifically he will discuss chinese history including their past greatness their century of humiliation and their current rise to power he will also discuss china's relations with its neighbors he will discuss the u.s china relationship and possibilities for where it might be headed he will discuss options with pros and cons for the us and her allies moving forward and dealing with china and finally he will discuss his thoughts on how the u.s should deal with china and why and now for tonight's webinar in terms of logistics we are using the zoom webinar platform tonight so everyone is automatically muted and will stay muted throughout the presentation addition the only persons you will see on your screen will be either myself or dr tara o'toole for questions tonight we will handle that through the q a button the q a button should be located on the bottom of your screen just click on the button type in your question and hit submit at the end of doctoro tools prepared remarks i will consolidate questions and relay them to her please note that this webinar is being recorded and it will be available on the baltimore council on foreign affairs website in about two weeks dr o'toole will speak for about 30 to 40 minutes at which point we will conduct the q a and now to tonight's speaker dr tara o'toole is a senior fellow and executive vice president at inquitel a private non-profit strategic investment firm that links the united states intelligence community and venture-backed start-up firms on the leading edge of technological innovation dr o'toole is leading a strategic inquitel initiative to explore the opportunities and risks that likely to arise as a result of advances in the biological sciences and biotechnologies with a particular focus on detection of and defense against biological attacks from 2009 to 2013 dr o'toole served as the undersecretary of science and technology at the department of homeland security she was the principal advisor to the secretary on matters related to science and technology in the decade before becoming under secretary under secretary dr o'toole founded and directed two university-based think tanks devoted to civilian biodefense specifically she was a professor of public health and the director of the johns hopkins center for civilian bio defense studies at the johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health in 2003 the center and its staff became affiliated with the university of pittsburgh from 1994 to 1998 dr o'toole served in the clinton administration as assistant secretary for environmental safety and health and the department of energy finally dr o'toole is also a past chair of the board of the federation of american scientists and she is also a member of the council on foreign relations please join me in giving a warm welcome to dr tara o'toole thank you duncan i appreciate the opportunity to be with you today and talk about biology and national security risks and opportunities next slide please um we are at an inflection point in the history of technology and science and i'm going to try and make five main points first of all our advancing knowledge of the life sciences of how organisms operate reproduce and react to the environment is converging with digital technologies to create a biorevolution that is going to be hugely impactful on society secondly biotechnologies of many kinds including synthetic biology uh will be foundational to the 21st century economy and they're going to be a critical area for global ngo political competition china in particular is implementing an aggressive strategy to become the world's leader in biotech and the top competitor in the bioeconomy now the united states is the innovation engine of this biorevolution as a consequence of our long investment in the national institutes of health and university research but our translational capacity is weak and puts us at a disadvantage and finally i'm going to make a few comments on how synthetic biology and various other biotechnologies are critical to the culprit response but so far have been underutilized next slide please so what's happening is that our understanding of how living organisms grow reproduce repair and react to the environment has been growing exponentially and this growth and understanding has in part been made possible by uh the increasing computational power in digital capacities that we have accrued over the last 50 years among other things these capacities have given us the instrumentation needed to actually quantitatively measure and observe biomolecules at the nanometer level which has contributed mightily not only to our understanding but our capacity to manipulate biological organisms in their parts and pieces the biorevolution which includes but is not limited to synthetic biology is going to have huge consequences across a wide range of industries this is not just about biomedicine it is also going to and already is impacting agriculture energy material science and it's going to become a fundamental manufacturing platform in the next 10 or 20 years as i will explain it's hard to identify a major social problem that is not going to have biology and biotech as at least part of its solution which is one of the reasons that so many countries are interested in developing a bioeconomy there are very low barriers to entry in biotech um you don't need to be build a um a uranium enrichment plant in order to get into the industry and developing nations as well as highly developed nations are definitely pursuing biotechnology as part of their economic plan the markets are global highly capitalized because these products are avidly desired along around the world and as i'll explain the economic and national security implications are very significant on the other hand um powerful biotechnology like all powerful bio all powerful technologies comes with a downside almost everything in biotech is dual use that is the core technologies that you need to build vaccines are essentially the core technologies needed to build bio weapons and that are resistant to vaccines and all of these technologies are increasingly accessible to a larger and larger population as the industry builds out they're increasingly automated meaning many people are going to have access to these technologies and as we begin to think about or actually manipulate the living world ethical concerns are going to raise their head and be very complicated and will undoubtedly differ from country to country next slide please most of the core technologies that are fueling the biorevolution have been around for a while and they amount to um [Music] the capacity to read write and edit the code of life one of the great insights of the past 20 years in science is the recognition that life is written in code and that biology is essentially programmable instead of using ones and zeros to program life we use the four nucleotides of dna and we are we have been sequencing dna that is reading the genetic code since the 1970s getting faster more accurate at it doing it much more cheaply and efficiently and in fact the capacity to read dna is improving much faster than moore's law writing dna that is dna synthesis is still a slower operation it's more expensive but it too is improving fast in addition in the last 10 years we have been using crispr which is an old immune mechanism in bacteria that was discovered to essentially be the swiss army knife of gene editing crispr is very cheap fast to use you can learn how to do it and if you're a laboratory technician in about an hour and a half and it allows one to alter specific dna sequences and modify gene function very easily relative to the old methods which we have been using since the 1970s back in 1978 we first used recombinant dna to make synthetic insulin for the first time out of e coli bacteria and we've been doing a lot of gene editing since but crispr has changed the game because of its ease of use and its speed and its low cost if you put all of this together you you have the enterprise of synthetic biology which is also called engineered biology and i will explain that more in a minute but as i said then we'll repeat synthetic biology is likely to become the most important if not one of the most important manufacturing platform in the next decades added to all of this are artificial intelligence methods which allow these fundamental foundational technologies dna synthesis sequencing and editing to essentially be turbocharged and become increasingly accurate and specific artificial intelligence is already being applied to a wide swath of biology and is having real impacts not only in synthetic biology but also in drug discovery diagnostic imaging and personalized medicine next slide please what is synthetic biology um it's basically using living organisms as factories to make stuff you want we are trying to engineer biology in a way that allows us to [Music] direct organisms usually yeast or bacteria to make stuff we want in a reliable repeatable way and there's many projects within the overall enterprise of synthetic biology including the creation of catalogs of standardized parts so that for example once you figure out exactly what the sequence of nucleotides this gene does you can use it again and again in different contexts for different purposes it's come a long way in the past 10 years or so and it is already part of your world this is not a futuristic vision of what biology can do this is what's happening now next slide please and synthetic biology is just is not just a technique to improve biomed though it is certainly uh very important in the creation of new therapeutics and vaccines as i will explain but it's already responsible for the production of about 20 percent of all the industrial chemicals used in the world food is been a big target of synthetic biology if you've had an impossible burger which is a plant-based burger that tastes like real meat at least according uh to published literature it tastes like meat because it contains heme a protein found in meat found in blood actually that the company cultured out of yeast and can put together in large quantities in their impossible burgers there's also lots of materials with new and desirable properties being made with synbio for example having figured out the gene sequences inherent in spider silk we're using those genes and asking organisms to make fibers that are then woven into fabrics that have been used in very high tech extreme sport type gear sneakers jackets etc etc the energy business will definitely be affected by synthetic biology the markets are discouraging right now but the low pollution level of many synbio experiments will become increasingly attractive human engineering is already ongoing there are clinical trials in progress now with real humans trying to delete or add genes that are the cause of severe genetically inherited diseases at least one seems to be working they are also symbio is also key to a lot of the advances being made in cancer therapy transplant organs we are trying to figure out how to synthesize whole organs that can take the place of failed human organs so that for example an artificial pancreas could be used instead of insulin to eliminate type 2 diabetes one of the most intense areas of application of synbio is in agriculture if you can switch out the genes in a plant to make it more pest resistant or hardier under adverse environmental conditions like drought or flood you don't have to wait for the plant to grow up and test it under those conditions china is working very hard in bio in synthetic biology and agriculture not only um in the application of plants but they are also growing animals food animals such as pigs that are much more muscly than your normal pig there was a report out in june by the mckinsey global studies group that offer asserted that 60 of the physical inputs to the global economy could be produced biologically and only one-third of those inputs are actual biological materials and only half of what they are contemplating as economic inputs are related to health whether that happens in 10 years or 20 years is difficult to speculate about but the mckinsey mckinsey report opines that this uh new capacity to manufacture stuff could be worth two to four trillion dollars annually in the global economy depending upon how rapidly it is taken up and incorporated next slide please [Music] now i'm going to talk about national security applications and synthetic biology and these are all examples of um what could be done today again this is not very futuristic these are current capabilities first of all i'm going to bang on this point we need to be extremely competitive in synthetic biology in order to maintain economic competitiveness globally because uh synthetic bio is going to be so important to the economy we could definitely use synthetic biology to improve the resilience of our supply chain so for example almost all the latex in the world comes from malaysia so when we needed magnitudes of water more personal protective gear than we normally had for covert response there was no way to efficiently increase the supply of latex out of malaysia to the extent that it was needed had we been better prepared we could have made latex and many other materials using synthetic biology i'll come back to synthetic biology's role in epidemic detection management and uh response we've been thinking about this for quite some time but in qutel but there are also a lot of direct military applications you can use synthetic biology to develop materials with unique performance properties as i mentioned with spider silk you can also use it in places where you do not have a whole factory you can use it at various scales and you do not need a lot of expensive or complex equipment necessarily so that you could deploy this on on ships in the field and so forth and perhaps as we have been testing in space um it is the key to rapid design and protection of medical countermeasures in the event of either a deliberate bio attack or an emergent infectious disease and we are absolutely definitely moving towards human augmentation we already have prosthetic limbs that can be operated by the person thinking that they want to raise their hand technology brain interfaces are under intense study and are already being used for example to treat some of the symptoms of parkinson's disease and other maladies and as we apply artificial intelligence methods to understanding and deeply reading the human genome we will be able to manipulate complex human traits that is human traits like intelligence that are not simply inherited but are the react the result of complicated interactions between genes between other genes that promote or suppress different genetic manifestations and so forth so it is not out of the question and it is not uh at all beyond um uh reach in the next 50 years that we will actually be genetically manipulating intelligence for example or one's capacity for strength etc etc next slide now back to the bio revolution more broadly when you ask people uh what actually let's go to the next slide um we'll skip this one when you ask people what the national security implications of biology are they usually go blank but if they thought about it at all the first thing they mentioned is bioweapons and there is no question that uh the biorevolution has made it much easier to build a biological weapon and you don't need any fancy gene engineering in the 1960s the u.s built biological weapons that were as lethal and covered as large an area as nuclear weapons and they were explicitly designed as basically alternative to nukes and they were tested in virtually every forum short of actual war and again this was using 1960s technology we can now engineer biological weapons we can make organisms that are resistant to vaccines that are resistant to antibiotics we can combine different diseases and peculiar ways that would make them very difficult to diagnose or treat and we are not limited to infectious diseases we are as i said learning to manipulate how the brain functions and a weapon that would make everybody go to sleep or feel extremely anxious is not out of the question it's also important to realize that agriculture which is a trillion dollar industry in the us could also be targeted bio weapons are very difficult to collect intelligence against um because virtually everything uh that you need as well as all of the operations are dual use they look like legitimate biology they have a very small footprint and they're hard to track and as i said earlier the um the science the know-how and the equipment are all easily and increasingly accessible and increasingly automated so that's the first bio national security uh threat that we have to worry about in the biorealm the second as we are living through are epidemics of naturally occurring infectious diseases we are in an age of epidemics and we have been for the past 20 years or so the frequency and the impact of infectious disease outbreaks has been increasing that's very well documented and about 70 percent of these outbreaks are coming from animal diseases that spill over into human populations west nile virus appeared in 1999 for the first time in north america we then had sars murs not to mention hiv which came out of monkeys in africa we belatedly realized etc etc almost all of this increase in human epidemics is a consequence of our trade and travel patterns we go everywhere all the time very fast or we did until march and also we are increasingly because of population pressures and commercial intent intruding into once remote ecosystems where we're coming in contact with the new bucks that have lived in animals um i used to have a hard time uh convincing um national security people that epidemics could be disrupted costly and even destabilizing um i think that point has been made by now and we could do better we need to develop a much more strategic approach to epidemic management and we can next slide please um the third bio threat that threatens national security is i would argue potentially the most important in the long term and that is the threat of becoming non-competitive in the global bioeconomy this is particularly painful because the u.s is the innovation engine of the bio revolution since the 50s we spent about a trillion dollars on nih and it is the basic science coming out of nih other government cdc and universities that is really behind the current capabilities we have the largest biotech economy right now which bob carlson has estimated is about three percent of our gdp though it's very poorly measured and tracked and uh the bio tech sector is growing by about 10 percent a year and has done so over the past decade but as i say it's not well tracked in 2019 for example u.s biotech companies raised about 22 billion dollars in bc funds uh over uh about 1500 deals and they're going to break that record this year for sure we hold the most uh patents and publications uh but china is uh not only close behind but overtaking us they're spending a lot more on r d than we are the nih which is getting a budget raise this year i heard today still hasn't repeated its peak purchasing power in 2003 and we have not come close to investing nih with sufficient funds to keep up with the pace of science today someone getting their first what's called an r01 grant from nih which is the signal that you'll get promoted to professor someday in academia the average age at which one first gets such a grant which were originally intended for young up-and-coming scientists is now 41. in addition and this is particularly injurious and telling the u.s government um funds very little mission-driven translational bioscience um which is in contrast to the way the government has supported the physical sciences since world war ii we do not have any doe national labs for bio although some of the labs do a little bit of bioscience we do not have seven different budget categories for translational bioscience as dod for example has for physical science and we are definitely not investing in the kind of infrastructure that we need to be competitive in the bioeconomy and that's because basically biology has not been seen as a national priority let alone a national security priority it's been seen strictly as a biomed investment china on the other hand has made very clear in policy documents and speeches from leaders uh in every way that an authorian authoritarian state can that it is going to dominate biotech it's a top political economic and scientific priority they have been saying so in the last two five-year plans which govern their r d spends they have very specific goals the government is investing large amounts of money in this and they have changed the rules of the chinese fda to more like ours to be prepared to become innovators in the farmer market they are building big infrastructure in bio um and these as is the case with most of what china does are large public private investments they're building incubators they are building science parks they are building gene banks and tissue banks etc etc they also have a very detailed plan to make sure their talent pipeline is full one interesting aspect of this is that china's giant internet firms like baidu tencent and so forth are becoming in the last couple of years actively engaged in biotech and in healthcare they are doing this in precision medicine but they are also doing it in digital health and in genomics and these internet firms have particular expertise in artificial intelligence and they are applying those in the bio realm talent is critical in this competition and as i said china has a plan we do not of all the foreign students in the united states one-third are chinese and about 40 percent of them are in the life sciences in biotech uh they are developing their own innovative big pharma capacities in china and they are very successfully wooing the top managers of merck of astrazeneca of all of the big multinational local bio firms to chinese companies next slide next slide um and china has very urgent and compelling reasons um to invest in biomed and in biotech generally uh it has an aging population the health of its people is very poor they have the highest incidence of cancer in the world they've got over 100 million diabetics and they have a growing middle class with great expectations of getting access to better health care meanwhile they don't have enough doctors to service their population and doctors take a long time to grow and train they have a very limited health care infrastructure not nearly enough hospitals and most of their hospitals are quite primitive which was part of the problem they experienced in wuhan during the cobot outbreak only a small fraction of their hospitals in mohan were able to take care of cobit patients and of course they have a big challenge in feeding their population under conditions of changing climate um the biomedical enterprise that we have built globally is very dependent on international collaboration if you look at the top 10 science journals 60 of the published article bioscience journal 60 of the top of the published articles are international international collaborations so we do not want to wreck that as we seem to be intent on doing right now we want to keep the basic science that underlies human disease and therapies for those disease uh in the realm of openness and sharing we want to cooperate on finding new therapies and ways to prevent disease but china absolutely sees biotech as a means to acquire global economic and geopolitical power it is very clear about this that's one of the reasons biotech is such a top priority across their many strategic planning documents and they are shifting their financial rules to favor chinese firms they are no longer just the manufacturer of drugs invented in the united states or sweden in the uk this year they got their first innovative drug through fda and they are moving very fast in that direction i already talked about their use of ai skills next slide please so if we want to um maintain our economic competitiveness particularly in um [Music] in comparison with china then we need to realize that this is a sputnik moment this really is a race um in part because um amassing large genomic libraries large collections of genomes that one has sequenced and also interpreted gives one a great advantage and china has been doing that deliberately and aggressively for decades and we have not we have treated our gene bank as a little piece of the national library of medicine within nih it has not been well funded it has not been emphasized and that alone uh the race to acquire large libraries of the planet's genomic heritage um gives china an advantage starting out um so we have to understand uh that biotech is now part of not only our economic security but also understand the national security implications of biotechnology particularly in relation to china's challenge we have to get much more strategic about integrating public health and epidemic preparedness into national security strategy not just for civilian defense but also for force protection because we are going like i said we're in an age of epidemics we're going to see more natural outbreaks and um uh possibly uh deliberate attacks so we ought to figure out how to measure and track these bioeconomies and be able to make sense of them we do not do that now different parts of biotech are counted differently some not at all synthetic biology not at all for example and so we have a false picture of how important this is to our economy we really have to get serious about a technical talent pipeline not just to feed the universities and make sure american kids are studying bio but the public sector the government needs to know a lot more about biology and biotech and have a lot more extra expertise uh in order uh to run the country frankly and as i said we need a plan for building a much more translational infrastructure a much more as much stronger translational infrastructure for bioscience and biotech possibly starting with some big projects you know the physical sciences have large telescopes we built the large hadron collider we built linear accelerators the only big bio project the country has ever done has really been the human genome project uh which was at about a billion dollar buy and that was in 1993. um in the last couple of years the congress has strengthened reviews of chinese investment in american biotech companies i think this is a good thing but we need to be aware that this is a very significant [Music] investment in our translational capacity and if we simply ban chinese investment in startup companies we'll be very unhappy with the outcome next slide okay covid um just a few remarks on this uh the topic i've been spending the last six months thinking and talking about next slide um as duncan said at iqt we spent several years thinking about the biotechnologies that would be useful in identifying managing and quenching infectious disease epidemics and we addressed this question because we needed some way to frame our investigation of everything that was going on in biotechnology which is you know quite a broad and complicated landscape and basically you need to address four big functional chunks to manage an epidemic first of all you have to be able to diagnose and characterize the pathogen that's the first broad surveillance and detection block if you cannot diagnose the pathogen you cannot track the epidemic and you cannot stop it as we are demonstrating today the irony is that rapid sheep accurate diagnostics are eminently feasible technol technologically but the absence of good diagnostics against infectious diseases is mostly a market failure um the second functional issue that is essential is protecting the healthy and one could argue that this is even more important on a national security basis than treating the sick the best way to protect the healthy is with vaccines vaccines are one of the most cost-effective and amazing medical interventions humans have yet concocted but what we need is not the usual 10-year journey towards developing a vaccine we need to be able to design test manufacture and scale up vaccines on demand we think that too is within reach it's harder than the diagnostics but it's not impossible and when we're protecting the healthy we have to prioritize health care workers as well as what we now are calling essential workers in order to keep the economy going and also in order to treat the sick treating the sick is very complicated therapeutics are actually harder to make usually than vaccines but one of the things that one needs to be able to accomplish in treating the sick is you have to keep hospitals functional you can't stop treating heart attacks you can't stop seeing people with strokes you can't stop uh delivering babies and figuring out how to offload the pressure on the hospitals from the people suffering from the epidemic disease is a key part of epidemic response and through all of this you need to be able to collect analyze and disseminate uh the information that you need to have situational awareness and make informed decisions and as we are also seeing with copen our capacity to do this is very limited in part because of our very fragmented public health system we have over 5 000 different state local city public health agencies in the united states and they are not connected to each other and they are not efficiently connected to cdc nor does cdc have the analytical capacity to take in this data in near real time and make sense of it and the public health system is almost severed from the health care system very few governors for example even as of a month ago had real-time data on how many icu beds were filled or available in their states so those are the four hunks of functional capacities that you need some of these are not dependent on biotech they're dependent upon other things like information processing etc etc but without these four functional capacities you can't handle an epidemic next slide and here's how the biorevolution in particular has and might have um to an even greater degree helped us manage covet and it's not over yet needless to say um the sars kobe virus was um isolated and sequenced and that sequence was shared globally in record time china did it first it's now been done many dozens of times by many uh organizations and many countries that is essential it took us three months to do that in sars in 2003. we did this in about 12 days phylogenetics which is uh the process of following the mutation and the evolution of the virus over time as it goes to place to place has been recognized since the west african ebola outbreaks as being a very useful tool and it has been critical in helping us understanding how the virus spread globally so we now know as a consequence of phylogenetics that new york city uh was infected not by china not by people coming from china but by people coming from europe as they you know habitually do into new york um the diagnostic story has been a very sad one of lost chances you all know about the failure of cdc to rapidly create a pcr test that worked even more important i think history will show was the failure of the government to engage the private sector's cooperation fully in flooding um the market with various kinds of diagnostic tests that were then available and also failure to even today develop a strategic roadmap to get the kind of diagnostics we really want what we want is diagnostics that are accurate and work like pregnancy tests that you can use in your home or as you go into the office they're very easy to interpret and that say you are or you are not infected with cobra these are coming two of these both based upon crispr technology have already passed emergency youth authorization by fda and as i said more will coming we should have made a drive for them starting about six months ago it would be it will be a different world when these arrive and are very widely available which will be the next hurdle can we up scale manufacturing people working on new therapeutics are using synthetic biology very heavily they are practicing on synthetic viruses to see what will clamp on and stop the virus monoclonal antibodies may be the first big hope of something that will really treat people who are really sick with covid these are in clinical trials already and they act as kind of short-lived vaccines so we may be able to use them to protect health care workers and essential workers or to treat the very sick and we're trying to use ai to find drugs that are already out there and marketed that might be used against cobra but there's very little coordination of this and it's hidden mix vaccines are the most intensely targeted areas for synthetic biome in particular next slide depending on who you believe there's somewhere between 170 and 190 attempts and making a covered 19 vaccine underway and this is a picture of the five different categories of vaccines that are most advanced the first two columns depict very innovative vaccines dependent on in the first place these are gene-based vaccines the column says dna and rna vaccine and what they're trying to do is reprogram the immune system to go after the viral proteins and kill the virus moderna is the poster child for this type of vaccine the government has put a lot of money into moderna the downside is we have never actually licensed such a vaccine and so there will be a lot of questions about safety even if they're proven efficacious there's also a real question is whether or not we can scale up dna or rna synthesis to the degree needed there are also a couple of companies one in particular that iqt invested in some time ago that basically reprogram the virus reprogram copiod so that it cannot replicate quickly enough to cause disease but it acts as a perfect antigen it tricks the immune system into thinking it's the real virus that will be very interesting inactivated viruses are the type that the chinese are going after these are old technologies for making vaccines the worry is that with covid they may cause people who then get infected after being vaccinated to get even sicker but china is already getting ready to use one of these inactivated vaccines for their military and the other two uh approaches are also being pursued the companies listed on the bottom are the ones at the beginning that are moving fastest and for whom we have the most hope uh but as i said there's over 100 companies in the race unfortunately it's not well coordinated that coordination was not helped by the u.s dropping out of wh which is acting as the de facto head of this effort but there's a lot of science being done really unprecedented effort across the world next slide so i hope that made you as optimistic this should temper your enthusiasm a little bit of when we made the slide there were 120 uh five vaccines that still hadn't made it into any kind of human trial they were still being worked at on the bench or with animals uh seven vaccines are in uh phase one trials that is does this vaccine cause any harm to people when we give it to healthy volunteers seven are in uh later stage safety trials one only one is in a phase three trial which is uh expensive and uh takes several months to complete so we're at the beginning of this quest and it's complex science complex manufacturing and as i say it's mostly uncoordinated next slide but this is i mean covet is a classic story of epidemics um epidemics are very different from other kinds of catastrophes and from natural disasters um and this is true throughout history um they unfold slowly you know they always catch you unawares it's a long leap from thinking something weird is happening to throwing everything you've got against it and that's where responders governments throughout history even when they had the capacity to respond have fallen down they usually go on for years and it looks like this one will too it looks like we're going to be in this for about two years at least would be my guess they're always confusing um especially at the beginning when they are happening in different places reported differently expanding at different paces etc etc this is particularly true when it's a new pathogen we haven't seen before west nile was very puzzling sars was very puzzling mers was a little bit easier to understand because we'd just gone through sars and it is not coincidental that south korea has done such a good job relatively speaking responding to koben they had a very recent near-death experience with mers when a couple of imported cases of that disease and of the coronavirus infecting people coming in from the kingdom of saudi arabia almost toppled their health care system so they built infrastructure they got ready and they used that response capacity in copen situational awareness is always challenging you never know what's going on uh data always lags events and it's very hard to get good data to inform decisions everybody is in denial for a long time and epidemics always accentuate existing social frictions which is one of the reasons so many novels are written about epidemics it's a perfect landscape or our campus on which to examine a society ubiquitous it always occurs and is usually very hurtful and lasts a long time people in africa are still being denied housing if they had ebola even if they've recovered and the response burden falls on social systems that are chronically uh underfunded and overburdened to begin with as we're seeing and the consequences of big epidemics are often quite severe though they've fallen equally on society and long lived that said we could do much better now given the technologies we've had if we had uh the will uh and the organization needed to employ them and i'll stop there sorry to go on so on thank you very much happy to answer some questions duncan okay um we have a few questions uh the first one is is where does india now a major defense partner sit in the biotech sphere that's a great question india is complicated it has a lot of science talent it is a very active manufacturer particularly of generic drugs drugs others have invented that have come off patent they are pretty self-sufficient when it comes to vaccines several american companies that are trying to create an innovative covet vaccine have partnered with indian manufacturers who have promised to make the vaccine should it prove useful that said hopes for them becoming sources of innovation in biomed have not proved out so far they have tried but not completely succeeded in establishing standards that would be globally recognized as adequate for manufacturing many vaccines and that basically is i think their next big hurdle but they have a lot of good science a lot of manufacturing capacity they need to improve their own indigenous fda and ability to meet global standards for safety and reproducibility and so forth okay the next question is is how do we cooperate with other nations in the biotech area and yet yet not create a potent adversary and kind of the follow-on to that is involves u.s intellectual property and how do we stop the stealing of that in this particular area if we are sharing yeah well i think we need to make a distinction between basic science and biotechnology basic science you know how the living world works should be openly public openly published peer-reviewed and available to all how you translate that science into a product into a gene-engineered plant genome or into a um a new therapy um should be subject to intellectual property laws and not shared that's part that's part of that should be part of a country's excuse me economy and in economic property but particularly when it comes to managing human disease and problems like how are we going to feed the planet during climate change we need to create arenas for collaboration and cooperation and that requires getting state departments involved in formulating new ways of thinking about what's shared and what isn't and how we apply patents and how we think through who pays for what this is going to be a whole new world and we need to get busy uh making it um it would be very useful to the united states if we were the ones setting the standards and we certainly have the scientific capacity and prominence to do that but we need the state department to call the meeting and we need to get others starting with our friends to start establishing the guidelines and the practice standards just as we have done with a lot of other engineered products and what we want to do is we want to create a level playing field that's very transparent such that if you're not in the agreement if you're not adhering to these standards you are disadvantaged so that's what we need to do it will be you know the work of a generation but we need to get started the next question is is what type of research in this area is being done in europe or in other nations and an example that was given is like israel europe is very active um israel is also active it's smaller of course so it's its volume of bioresearch is uh less than that of europe i would say in synthetic biology the uk uh is second to the united states and is actually when last we looked which was about two and a half years ago doing half of the synthetic biology in europe the uk is the source of all of the major dna sequencing technology that we have they have a very rich intellectual foundation in bioscience and they along with 20 other countries have a strategy for how they are going to invest in synthetic biology asia is also in the game particularly singapore and of course as i said china so i'm going to combine two questions on the next one and that is what is the scope and scale of additional research or investment that's needed by nih to set the us on a viable path going forward um so that's that's part one and are there other strategic things besides major investments by nih that are required going forward okay that's a great um that's a great start nih does basic research um they should continue to do basic research they should not become the translational arm of the life sciences that i think should be a new institution and there's many different ways of setting that up there's a bill uh in congress now called the endless frontier bill that would establish the national science foundation um as not only the national the um basic science research entity that it is but would also build in a new technology development arm this is not this is science overall not just biology that's an interesting idea i think it would be complicated to enact i would like to see one of the doe national labs be partly or wholly dedicated to translating bio particularly for national security purposes not weapons but defense and help us establish operational standards and further refine key technologies the daily labs were very important in operationalizing the human genome project and making it scalable i think they could do the same thing again for bio we need to build new infrastructure we should take a much more serious interest in the u.s gene bank called genbank um i think we should unearth it from its current status buried in the national library of medicine and there are other things that we could do tissue banks for example would have been very useful in cold but everybody was running around trying to scrape up a copy of the virus that ought not to be the case should we have an inquitel type organization for biodefense should we absolutely okay the next one is is um what's your best estimate of how many deaths might finally occur due to covet 19 in the united states that is really hard to say um a lot depends on us and um what we do and how we manage things going forward and over what period of time you're accounting deaths i mean we're now the u.s is five percent of the world's population but we have 25 of the world's coping cases and deaths um we're at uh 3.5 million uh infections i think in the united states and i think today we hit 133 000 deaths and it's going up quite steeply and it's going up in 43 states in july so that trajectory could be very bad you know we're six months in with 133 000 cases um and we seem to be accelerating um the um the curve over the last six weeks or so it doesn't have to be that way it's going to be difficult getting out of this masks would be my first wish a universal rule that everybody in public must wear a mask even if the mask is a crummy mask modeling has shown it makes a big difference in cutting down transmission and the more people that wear them the bigger that difference [Music] i think that large gatherings are a particularly bad idea where the school should open and how i think needs to be you know reasonably debated and carefully followed so that we acquire data we're going to get a vaccine but it could be a long time before one is available in general and it's going to be a long time it's going to be years before it's available to the world and as long as there's hot spots in other parts of the world we are at risk we truly are all in this together so the next one is is given that a vaccine um could likely take a long time to develop and then also get it out to the rest of the world leaving hot spots um would we be better off focusing on creating treatments or therapeutics such as antivirals for those who either contract covid or some other pathogen and get sick it's not an either or we have to do both as i said therapeutics are very difficult to develop because you get into issues of dose absorption a lot of medicines look good in the lab but then when you eat them your liver chews them up or they poison your kidneys they have toxic side effects we are there's a lot of companies working on therapeutics so far the world does not have any good antiviral medicines for copic uh remedier looks like it decreased the hospital stays for the sickest patients but it's no panacea it took us a long time with a huge effort to come up with the cocktail of medicines that ultimately held the hiv virus at bay these viruses are very tricky to deal with there's not going to be any simple antiviral available anytime soon my guess is what we will use on patients and fortunate enough to get sick is a combination of therapies so going back to the iqt question for biodefense and kind of piling onto that one is iqt currently enjoying success in finding ic other organizations to fund a sufficient amount of biodefense projects or companies to at least move us forward in the short term well our customers traditionally are mostly the intelligence community and they have not seen advancing biotech as their main mission so the short answer is no iqt has spent um its own money on the effort that we ran as and it's part of something that we do regularly to look into emerging technologies that we think will eventually be useful and or disruptive uh to the national security community so i think just to back up a little bit i think the secret sauce of iqt is that uh we can speak the language not just of the government but also of the startups the small innovative companies from which innovative technology is coming generally not just in bio and also uh to the investors to the venture capital community to basically keep these small startups afloat so i think the model is a very unique one given my experience in government i found iqt to be extremely useful and i think the key to success going forward is if not reproducing iqt than forging new vibrant living links between the private sector in the united states particularly in biotech and the public sector we need to get those two uh communities together talking and collaborating more effectively on behalf of national security okay thank you um we're out of questions and we're going to call it a night and first thank you to dr o'toole for for being with us tonight and spending her time with us and speaking to us thank you to all the members for for joining us hopefully folks can join us on september 24th and to everyone take care be safe be healthy and we'll see you in mid-september and have a good night thank you