Challenge
Unlocking the full promise of biotechnology requires building and sustaining the technological means to identify and combat emerging biological threats, whether natural, accidental, or deliberate, across every stage: (i) early detection and characterization of enhanced and novel biological threats, including those that may not resemble known pathogens, (ii) synthesis screening tools robust enough to disrupt materials access at the point of acquisition, and (iii) the ability to rapidly and accurately discern the origin of a biological incident.
AI Solution
AI will fuse multi-omic, metagenomic, clinical, environmental, and open-source signals to detect anomalous biological signatures, characterize novel behavior from sparse data, accelerate countermeasure design, and sharpen attribution. This will enable new capabilities, including AI-guided automated sequencing of environmental samples to capture evolving biological threats, metagenomic next-generation sequencing and surveillance to flag unknown threats far faster and more cost-effectively than traditional methods, and robust, rapid screening for sequences of concern that safely broadens access to transformative scientific tools.
Justification
No Nation can match America’s ability to build safe, secure scientific pipelines. The Department of Health and Human Services brings unique data and expertise in emerging epidemiological threats and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveillance and biothreat radar initiatives, the Department of Energy’s national laboratories contribute threat characterization, bioinformatics, and secure computing, alongside the National Nuclear Security Administration’s experience embedding AI in extremely high-consequence environments; the U.S. Department of Agriculture guards American food and agricultural supply; the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology defines the methodology for verifiable synthesis screening; the Department of War and the Department of Homeland Security anchor threat detection, characterization, and response; and the U.S. National Science Foundation conducts foundational research in the evolution and ecology of infectious diseases.
National Impact
A predictive, verifiable, AI-enabled defense shrinks detection, response, and countermeasures timelines while ensuring superior capability to determine attribution. These capabilities protect Americans by deterring adversaries and shielding the bioeconomy from misuse.
This was last updated .