Please join us in welcoming Swati Sureka, Strategy and Policy Analyst at Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) Federal, where she supports the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Readiness Policy and Oversight. Her talk, titled "A New Paradigm for Threat Agnostic Biodetection: Biological Intelligence (BIOINT)," will take place on Tuesday, December 10th, at noon PT.
Just as remote imaging formed the basis for a new domain of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) spanning military and civilian applications, we posit that agnostic sequencing of environmental nucleic acid samples should drive a paradigm shift in how we seek to understand our biological world. This new paradigm, which we call “biological intelligence,” builds on novel technologies and trends in biosurveillance, and differs from traditional approaches in six critical ways:
Persistence: BIOINT is always on, not just activated when a crisis is already in motion.
Pervasiveness: BIOINT is targeted to a gap-informed geographic distribution of sites with high risk of biothreat emergence and spread.
Agnostic approach: In order to detect novelties and anomalies, BIOINT looks beyond narrow analysis of known threats, to broad analysis of metagenomic baselines.
Global perspective: The accelerating global movement of biothreats necessitates the aggregation and contextualization of BIOINT across borders.
Integrated intelligence: Variation in metagenomic data is best understood in the context of phenotypic, health, environmental, ecological, social, and economic data.
AI-enabled analysis: BIOINT unlocks the power of biological data by leveraging advanced computational tools for both forensics and foresight, enabling appropriate response.
The Advancing Threat Agnostic Biodefense Webinar Series brings together like-minded science and policy members of the biodefense community to discuss relevant research activities as well as barriers and enablers of a threat agnostic approach. The webinar series is hosted by the Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Technologies Division.
