GCBR Organization Updates, October 2025
Updates from CEPI, NTI | bio, GHSN, Asia CHS, CSR, CCDD, Blueprint Biosecurity, UNIDIR, Brown Pandemic Center, CLTR, 1DaySooner, SecureBio, Sentinel Bio, MBDF, Open Philanthropy and IBBIS
Welcome to the October edition of our newsletter featuring updates on organizations working to reduce Global Catastrophic Biological Risks (GCBRs). We’re skipping the highlights section this time, as this is our longest newsletter yet!
Happy reading!
—Tessa and Anemone
CEPI
CEPI is a global partnership working to accelerate the development of vaccines and other biologic countermeasures against epidemic and pandemic threats.
SynBio Africa 4.0 (Kigali): On 23 July, CEPI co-moderated a panel on biosecurity and equity, highlighting synergies vital to Africa’s bioeconomy and 100DM progress.
Joint Blog: On 8 September, CEPI, WEF, and IBBIS published Securing the Bioeconomy in the Age of AI, featuring the BioFunders Compact, Responsible Biodesign principles, and IBBIS.
NATO Biodefense Panel (Lisbon): On 9-11 September, CEPI showcased how 100DM capabilities advance NATO CBRN objectives alongside partners from Portugal, the U.S. Army, and the Council on Strategic Risks.
Sentinel Bio Partnership: On 20 September, CEPI announced a new collaboration to embed biosecurity-by-design in CEPI’s AI-driven Pandemic Preparedness Engine, balancing open access with misuse risks.
UNGA Roundtable (New York): On 23 September, CEPI and Foreign Policy convened leaders in health, AI, and biosecurity to accelerate responsible AI development for rapid vaccine design.
NTI | bio
The NTI | bio program works to identify gaps and promote lasting systemic change to improve biotechnology governance, strengthen biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and reduce global catastrophic biological risks.
NTI | bio launched Enhancing Transparency for Bioscience Research and Development, a new report outlining practical recommendations to strengthen the global norm against biological weapons development and use.
NTI | bio held an event on Sept 10 with honorary co-host U.S. Senator Todd Young on Capitol Hill to discuss the modernization of biotechnology governance and biosecurity practices to ensure innovation is protected.
NTI’s AIxBio Global Forum released a statement signed by leading global experts calling for urgent action to safeguard rapidly advancing AIxBio capabilities to prevent misuse while enabling scientific benefits.
NTI | bio partnered with Lattice Automation to design and pilot a standard for capturing and transmitting metadata alongside DNA or protein sequences. The additional context provided by this standard, known as the Biodesign Metadata Exchange (BMDE), can help biosecurity decision-makers assess risks more effectively by increasing their understanding of not only the sequence itself but also the design process behind it.
Global Health Security Network
The Global Health Security Network brings together policymakers, technical experts, and regional partners to strengthen global preparedness through cross-border collaboration, evidence-based policy, and coordinated detection and response to biological threats.
The Global Health Security Network (GHSN) is excited to host the Global Health Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, June 9–12, 2026. GHS2026 is the premier international gathering for policymakers, academics, and practitioners to connect, share groundbreaking research, and shape the future of global biosecurity and pandemic preparedness.
We are now accepting submissions for speakers, posters, skills-based workshops, side events, and panels highlighting the latest advances in addressing health security threats.
We welcome proposals on catastrophic biological risks, threat detection and mitigation, and strategies to reduce biosecurity vulnerabilities. Key themes include biotech governance, geopolitics, CBRNE threats, polycrisis, information hazards, pathogen detection, spillover prevention, and more.
Asia Centre for Health Security
The Asia Centre for Health Security (ACHS) (newsletter) is an academic think tank set up to strengthen Asia’s readiness for biological threats through scientific evidence, building expertise and capabilities, and forging strategic partnerships.
The quarterly ACHS Webinar Series discusses innovative developments in health security in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. The webinars are presented by leaders in the field of biosafety and biosecurity.
The next installment, “Governance of Dual-use Risks of Synthetic Biology: Recent Efforts in China”, will be held on 23 October 2025, Thursday at 6pm (GMT +08:00). It will be presented by Prof Weiwen Zhang, Baiyang Chair Professor of Synthetic Biology, Tianjin University. Register at https://asia-chs.org/webinar/achs-webinar-series/ before 22 October, Wednesday at 5pm (GMT+8:00).
On 11-12 September 2025, ACHS organised the Deliberate Biothreat Events (DBE) workshop in Singapore. The workshop, which covered a diverse range of topics in the DBE landscape, included 34 delegates with expertise in healthcare, public health, policy, defense, and law enforcement disciplines from 13 countries.
Council on Strategic Risks
The Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) is a nonprofit, non-partisan security policy institute devoted to anticipating, analyzing and addressing core systemic risks to security in the 21st century, with special examination of the ways in which these risks intersect and exacerbate one another.
CSR’s Global Biosecurity Accelerator partnered with the Bundeswehr Institute for Microbiology to host our first mid-career international fellows and the Berlin Biosecurity Dialogue, which focused on frontier capabilities for early warning. Susanne Riegraf, Deputy of the Federal Government Commissioner for Disarmament and Arms Control, provided strong opening remarks about deterring BW threats.
In September, CSR published an initial analysis of biodefense trends within the budget-in-brief documents from the FY 2026 US President’s Budget Request.
CSR hosted an event on supply chain vulnerabilities and leveraging biomanufacturing, coordinated with the new US House BIOtech Caucus. Representative Chrissy Houlahan provided closing remarks, highlighting the event’s theme of harnessing American innovation to bolster biotechnology and biomanufacturing.
Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
The Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD) at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health focuses on improving methods for infectious disease modeling and statistical analysis, reducing biosecurity risks, engaging with policymakers to enhance decision-making, and training the next generation of scientists.
Lipsitch was quoted in an article in Science on 7/11/25 on NIH’s suspension of dozens of pathogen studies over ‘gain-of-function’ concerns.
Lipsitch was featured on Sam Harris’ podcast Making Sense: Are we Prepared for the Next Pandemic? on 7/21/25
Lipsitch co-authored What is the relationship between viral prospecting in animals and medical countermeasure development?
On 10/2, Lipsitch participated as a panelist at the American Enterprise Institute’s workshop: Biosafety and Biosecurity for DURC and PEPP: Retrospective and Prospective Considerations for Policy.
On 1/1/26, Lipsitch will join Stanford University as the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor and Senior Fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation, part of the Freeman-Spogli Institute, where his work will focus on biosecurity. His scientific research will continue through appointments in the Department of Medicine (School of Medicine) and the Department of Biology (School of Humanities and Sciences).
Blueprint Biosecurity
Blueprint Biosecurity is a nonprofit dedicated to achieving breakthroughs in humanity’s ability to prevent, mitigate, and suppress pandemics.
Launched an RFP to fund research projects incorporating glycol vapor air disinfection into comprehensive pandemic preparedness and response strategies.
Launched an RFI to understand recent insights and advances in the ocular dosimetry of far-UVC. These insights aim to inform safety guidelines, technological innovation, and adoption strategies.
Published the article “Transmission Suppression Trials Are Hard” to Blueprint’s Far-UVC Field Notes substack. This post looks at why that evidence is difficult to translate into infection data, and how to design trials that produce results decision makers can act on, and what we know so far on far-UVC efficacy in this light.
Posted a list of funded programs on our website here.
UNIDIR
The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) is an autonomous institution within the United Nations that conducts independent research on pressing global challenges related to disarmament, arms control and international security.
UNIDIR has recently launched a new paper! Louison Mazeaud and Andraz Kastelic, “Cyberbiosecurity: A Matter of International Peace and Security?” UNIDIR, Geneva, 2025. https://doi.org/10.37559/WMD/25/CBW/02.
The global bioeconomy is growing rapidly notably aided by the convergence of biotechnology with advanced and powerful information and communication technologies (ICT). To better understand the nexus between ICT and the biological field, this paper begins with an outline of some of the benefits introduced by the integration of advanced ICT in biological research and development. It then introduces the above definition of the concept of ‘cyberbiosecurity’ and proceeds to outline some of the key risks at this nexus.
Pandemic Center, Brown University School of Public Health
The Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health works to reduce vulnerabilities and increase resilience to pandemics, other biological emergencies, and the harms they pose to health, peace, security, and prosperity.
Pandemic Center leaders Beth Cameron, Wilmot James, and Georgia Lagoudas drove recommendations to further pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, biosecurity, and clean indoor air.
We hosted “Healthy Indoor Air: A Global Call to Action,” the inaugural United Nations High-Level Side Event with over 300 in attendance. France, Montenegro and 165 partner countries signed the “Global Pledge on Healthy Indoor Air” to help make indoor air healthy for all.
We launched airclub.org as a global coalition of champions of clean indoor air.
We published “Clean Indoor Air: A Guide for State Leaders to Improve Indoor Air Quality” with 20 contributing organizations. It provides an evidence-based roadmap for state and local leaders to strengthen indoor air quality policy.
Our Game Changer Fellow Jon Arizti Sanz had his recent work with IPPS published Advancing the 100 Days Mission for Diagnostics: 2025 Global Gap Assessment
Centre for Long-Term Resilience
The Biosecurity Policy Unit at the Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR) works closely with the UK Government and other stakeholders to reduce extreme biological risks.
We published the RAND-CLTR Global Risk Index for AI-enabled Biological Tools, a structured framework for assessing tools based on their capabilities, accessibility, and technological maturity. We provide a landscape overview of developments and offer five recommendations for model developers, funders, and policymakers.
We have been working on a cost-benefit analysis for synthetic nucleic acid screening in the UK to compare the current voluntary guidance with mandated screening and will publish our findings by the end of 2025.
We have been developing our thinking on AI agents and defensive acceleration as it applies to biosecurity. Our AI-Biosecurity Policy Manager Richard Moulange has begun publishing on this topic as a part of the Asterisk Fellowship.
We submitted written evidence to the National Security Strategy Inquiry and the Medicine Security Inquiry in the UK parliament, and our Dr Paul-Enguerrand Fady will be providing oral evidence on the latter in October 2025.
1Day Sooner
1Day Sooner (news) is a nonprofit organization that advocates for high-impact medical studies and the efficient development and deployment of life-saving medical research and public health interventions.
We launched a Cooperative Participant Organization that aims to provide flexible support, accelerate recruitment, and integrate the voices of healthy participants throughout the clinical research process for challenge trials and other early-phase trials with healthy participants. This program will help accelerate academic trial research and proactively incorporate participants’ voices directly into studies. Researchers at Leiden University, Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Research Programme, University of Oxford, and others are the first collaborators of 1Day Sooner’s CPO program. The CPO collaborates with institutions globally, with a current focus on Europe, North America, and Africa.
Our new article in Nature Reviews Immunology explores the challenging landscape of hepatitis C vaccine development, specifically through subunit, virus-like particle, viral vector, and DNA and RNA vaccine methods.
SecureDNA
SecureDNA offers free, ultra-fast, and privacy-preserving DNA synthesis screening to detect regulated, controlled, or hazardous sequences; it is the only system that also screens millions of predicted functional variants to prevent evasion.
SecureDNA participated in EBRC’s Workshop on International Best Practices for Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening this past July in Brussels, where we were invited to speak about technical needs for robust sequence screening now and in the future.
We received a generous grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund to continue our critical work, with a focus on developing sophisticated screening resilience to novel AI sequences of concern (SoCs), as well as promoting global DNA synthesis screening education and adoption.
SecureBio
SecureBio (newsletter) is a nonprofit research organization working on new technologies and policy proposals to delay, detect, and defend against catastrophic pandemics.
Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO)
The NAO received a major grant, allowing the team to substantially expand its biosurveillance system. As part of this scale-up, we are hiring for critical roles in Partnerships, Response, Virology, and Wet Lab Management.
Published a post about ways to implement the planned Biothreat Radar for which $50m has been set aside in the President’s FY 2026 Budget.
Three benchmarks developed by the team – World Class Biology, the Human Pathogen Capabilities Test, and the Molecular Biology Capabilities Test – were publicly cited in AI system cards for the first time: OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Meta’s Code World Model.
Developed ABC-Bench, which tests agentic models’ biocapabilities, and ABLE, an eval suite that assesses the ability of LLMs and agents to use Biological AI Models in a dual-use protein design workflow.
The AI team will soon post a job opening for a junior software engineer, and welcome initial enquiries or recommendations.
Sentinel Bio
Sentinel Bio is a non-profit philanthropic fund focused on eliminating pandemic risks.
Strategy
We shared an update on our current priorities, continuing our focus on safeguarding biological AI models and commercial nucleic acid synthesis: Why We’re Betting on AI-Bio Security and Governance
We’re exploring alternative access control ‘chokepoints’ for biosecurity, including materials, reagents, and services
AIxBio safeguards and evidence
Launched a partnership with CEPI on managed access for dual-use biological AI models
Expanding previous work cataloguing biological design tools with Epoch AI
Nucleic acid synthesis security
Completed a project to map all providers of custom gene-length dsDNA
Launched a project on mechanisms for sharing information across the industry
Working with Gary Abel on function-based screening
Joshua will be in Singapore in November for conferences on DNA synthesis governance hosted by the EBRC, IBBIS, and Asia CHS
Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund
The Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund (newsletter) supports efforts to understand risks and develop governance frameworks for mirror biology research before it becomes technically feasible to create mirror life.
We co-organized and hosted the Paris Conference on Risks from Mirror Life, June 12-13 with the Institut Pasteur. You can read the conference report, learn more about the event from the Institut Pasteur, and watch the talks from the first day.
With Patrick Cai from the University of Manchester, we co-hosted a workshop focused on technical questions related to the feasibility and governance of mirror life prior to a larger conference on Engineering and Safeguarding Synthetic Life on September 17-18. A writeup will be shared in the coming months.
The UK Government Office for Science hosted a roundtable discussion on mirror life that recommended preventing its creation.
The UNESCO International Bioethics Committee released a draft report recommending a precautionary global moratorium on mirror life.
The German Central Committee on Biological Safety released a comment recognizing the potential risks of mirror life and endorsing further discussion.
Open Philanthropy, Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness team
Open Philanthropy’s Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness team strives to prevent catastrophic biological risks through supporting efforts to safeguard dual-use technologies, detect and block the transmission of pandemic pathogens, and build the field’s capacity to solve these hard problems.
Welcomed two new team members to advance our work: Senior Program Associate Christian Ruhl and Chief of Staff Conor McGurk
Discussed the team’s work on the 80,000 Hours podcast, and wrote up some of our thinking in our blog here
Expanded our funding of SecureBio to accelerate a pathogen-agnostic pandemic early warning system
Growing our grantmaking capacity through hiring, and seeking new funding opportunities – see jobs & opportunities section below
IBBIS
The International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science (IBBIS) (news) is a Geneva-based nonprofit that works collaboratively with global partners to strengthen biosecurity norms and develop innovative tools to uphold them.
IBBIS co-authored a new paper, Strengthening nucleic acid biosecurity screening against generative protein design tools, showing that synthesis screening software can detect AI-designed proteins, but requires patching. The work sets red-teaming precedents, including the first formal endorsement of tiered access to info-hazardous data by a leading journal.
The Screening Evaluation Portal has been launched, offering evaluations of sequence screening using a standard test set developed by US NIST. IBBIS invites synthesis providers, screening tool developers, and others to sign up for evaluations and share within their network.
IBBIS will host an international convening on November 6 in Singapore. The event will bring together governments, industry, and international organizations to advance harmonized global governance of DNA synthesis screening. The conversations will mark a major milestone toward aligning global efforts, strengthening shared standards, and highlight gaps and opportunities for action.
Opportunities
Jobs
Open Philanthropy is hiring grantmakers to help reduce catastrophic risks from biology. (Note: no preexisting bio background necessary.) They’re also eager to hear from potential grantees with ambitious project ideas. They’re especially interested in work on physical transmission suppression, metagenomic sequencing, PPE, medical countermeasures, biosecurity capacity-building, and at the intersection of AI and catastrophic biological risk. Apply by Oct 19 here. If you’re working on something promising or want to contribute, please fill out the Expression of Interest form.
Two-year postdoctoral fellowship at CISAC (Stanford) to develop practical criteria for assessing the scientific and social value of “risky research”, working with Prof. Marc Lipsitch and Prof. M. Anthony Mills. Ideal candidates have a PhD in biology, biotechnology, ethics, philosophy of science, or allied fields, with the ability to bridge science, philosophy, and policy. More information via this link. (Having worked with both Marc and Tony, I (Anemone) can strongly recommend applying!)
NTI is seeking a Vice President for Global Biological Policy and Programs. This position reports to the CEO and supervises a team of nine. This is a full-time position working in Washington, DC.
Nucleic Acid Observatory: hiring for critical roles in Partnerships, Response, Virology, and Wet Lab Management.
OpenAI: Lead Research Engineer / Scientist, Chemical & Biological Risk
UNSGM Regional coordinator for the Latin America and the
Caribbean region. Apply by October 9.
Conferences, Workshops, Calls for Papers
2026 Global Health Security Conference, Kuala Lumpur, June 2026: Call for Abstracts.
Applied Biosafety Call for Papers for a forthcoming Special Issue focused on the myriad of topics associated with global biosafety management. Learn more and submit by November 1 here.
Cyberbiosecurity Quarterly Call for Papers: Learn more and submit your papers for the inaugural issue here.
Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology Call for Papers for a forthcoming special topic on “Synthetic Nucleic Acid Technology: The Biosecurity Landscape”. Initial submissions due November 29.
AI x Bio Workshop, Strategies for Responding to Exponential AI and Biotechnology Growth, 1-day workshop in Washington, DC, November 13. Virtual attendance option. Abstract submissions open until October 20.
AI for Biorisk Management Workshop: 3-day workshop in Malta, February 11-13, 2026.
Other opportunities
ELBI Fellowship: Apply for the 2026 cohort by October 12. (Both of us, Tessa and Anemone, are ELBI alumni and strongly recommend applying!)
Applications are now open for CSR’s AI and National Security Convergence Fellowship, designed for mid-career professionals with experience in national security and emerging technology/AI fields.
UK ARIA: various opportunities; see here for more information.
A number of AI-focused fellowships highlighted on Peter Wildeford’s Substack.
The Biosecurity Forecasting Group has spun out of the Oxford Biosecurity Group; they are currently offering consulting for forecasting services such as horizon-scanning, and will offer an open-source forecasting dashboard in future.
We regularly solicit updates from a group of organizations that we believe are doing impactful work to reduce GCBRs in order to improve transparency, facilitate collaboration, and otherwise accelerate progress in our community. Do you have any opportunities (jobs, events, etc.) you would like to share with our network? Please use this form to submit them.
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Cover image credit: Human Natural Killer Cell”, NIAID on Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0