SUMMARY
Biointelligence and Biosecurity for the Intelligence Community (B24IC) program seeks to develop new capabilities, matching the wider synthetic biology and biotechnology fields, ensuring the Intelligence Community’s (IC’s) capability to meet the biointelligence and biosecurity threats of the 21st century. This includes developing new ways to collect, detect, analyze, and prevent traditional biothreats while also addressing the promise and perils associated with the growing fields of biotechnology and synthetic biology. To address these challenges, the IC seeks to advance research across multiple sub-disciplines of biology.
In recent decades, the rise of synthetic biology has corresponded with critical advances in biology research. From polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in the 1980s to next generation sequencing (NGS) in the late 90s to numerous mechanisms for genetic engineering enabling a variety of engineered organisms in the past decade, the branches of synthetic biology and enabling biotechnologies have advanced at a prodigious rate. The IC, and IARPA specifically, has pursued numerous research programs to advance security interests, but the needs of the IC require rapid advancement of numerous research topics to meet and leverage the advances the many biological disciplines have brought into reality in the past decades. These needs align with developing new methods for countering traditional biothreats of concern while also looking towards the future where bio-focused capabilities may enable or support IC relevant capabilities.
