Hi, I work on biosecurity at iGEM, can confirm we care quite a lot about it. A lot of these projects don’t seem obviously best solved through synthetic biology (cf. Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists) but iGEMers often surprise me!
I think many teams are already motivated to work on medical countermeasures, though I maybe see a somewhat greater number of exciting diagnostics projects than therapeutics projects (for example, two of the winners of the 2020 competition worked on rapid point-of-care diagnostics (https://2020.igem.org/Team:Leiden/Description, https://2020.igem.org/Team:TAS_Taipei). I would guess this is because it’s easier to measure the success of a prototype diagnostic over a few months than it is to figure out a relevant assay for treating a disease.
Hi, I work on biosecurity at iGEM, can confirm we care quite a lot about it. A lot of these projects don’t seem obviously best solved through synthetic biology (cf. Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists) but iGEMers often surprise me!
I think many teams are already motivated to work on medical countermeasures, though I maybe see a somewhat greater number of exciting diagnostics projects than therapeutics projects (for example, two of the winners of the 2020 competition worked on rapid point-of-care diagnostics (https://2020.igem.org/Team:Leiden/Description, https://2020.igem.org/Team:TAS_Taipei). I would guess this is because it’s easier to measure the success of a prototype diagnostic over a few months than it is to figure out a relevant assay for treating a disease.
Last year we tried to incentivize more direct work on technical advances in biosecurity via giving out 5 microgrants (https://2021.igem.org/Teams/Grants/Safety) and doing more to promote and spotlight our award for Safety and Security (https://video.igem.org/w/nkrCA4EaFGEuefUtbmLijN). We’ll be iterating on that program this year, though I don’t know exactly what form it will take; I’m definitely taking inspiration from the ideas here and in the Future Fund ideas thread, though.