Active recommendation Biosecurity Global catastrophic risks

Blueprint Biosecurity

▲ Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Blueprint Biosecurity is a nonprofit organization that moves the most promising pandemic prevention interventions from concept to reality by providing resources to researchers and strategic guidance for policymakers and philanthropists to address global catastrophic biological risks.

What problem are they trying to solve?

Blueprint Bio is among the best organizations we have found tackling the problem of global catastrophic biological risks. As described in our recent report on the issue, pandemics continue to pose a major threat to human civilization, but our society remains under-prepared for the next outbreak. Rapid progress in enabling technologies (including artificial intelligence), combined with ongoing techno-scientific progress in the life sciences may soon allow malicious actors to engineer dangerous pathogens that could cause pandemics far worse than anything seen before. In the worst case, such a pandemic could lead to the collapse of modern civilization and pose an existential risk to humanity.

What do they do?

Blueprint Bio’s work begins by identifying critical pandemic prevention capabilities and coordinating actions to bring the most promising solutions to fruition. The organization does this by mapping the landscape of biosecurity interventions and coming up with “blueprints” — clear and actionable roadmaps — for the most promising defenses. These roadmaps are targeted at key pandemic decision makers such as researchers, government agencies, policymakers, and philanthropists. The “blueprint” gives these stakeholders a clear path forward for implementing a given intervention. For example, Blueprint Bio is one of the leading organizations working on issues relevant to germicidal ultraviolet light (see our recent report, Germicidal Ultraviolet Light and Disease Transmission Reduction) and will publish their far-UVC Blueprint in fall of 2024.

We recommend Blueprint Bio because it is a highly capable team of experts with a strategy that hits all of the “impact multipliers” that we consider critical to high-impact biosecurity interventions. Blueprint Bio’s Executive Director is Jake Swett, who helped lead the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense’s work on the Apollo Program for Biodefense. The President’s previous Science Advisor credited it as inspiration for the American Pandemic Preparedness Plan and an $88B budget request from the administration for pandemic preparedness. Biosecurity experts we interviewed for our evaluation of Blueprint Bio emphasized the organization’s focus on catastrophic pandemics and their ability to positively shape policy discussions, for example on pandemic-proof PPE and on germicidal UV light (see Founders Pledge's report on GUV).

Blueprint Bio is a young organization that we believe has significant ability to absorb more funding to expand its operations across all its priority areas and advance Blueprint Bio’s vision of “a world resilient against biological threats that pose pandemic threats to humanity.”

What problem are they trying to solve?

What do they do?

Why do we recommend them?

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