By William BeaverThe race to create a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 has shown the world the potential of “platform technologies”, which are defined by their ability to rapidly discover and manufacture medical countermeasures against a wide variety of biological threats, especially novel ones. Department of Defense (DoD) investments in platform technologies have seen growing U.S. government…
By Yong-Bee Lim The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released a report titled Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology in 2018. Beyond focusing on pathogens and biochemicals, this report discussed how nefarious actors may use technical advances in delivering genetic information like messenger RNA (mRNA) to generate a new class of…