GCBR Organization Updates, July 2026

In this issue:

• What the UN, WHO, and UK government are saying about mirror life governance;

• 88 countries convene in Kuala Lumpur for GHS2026 amid a growing Bundibugyo virus outbreak;

• Blueprint Biosecurity launches its first RFP on pathogen-agnostic biothreat detection, plus new jobs and fellowship deadlines across the field;

• And more!

The most recent updates from Active Site, Asia Center for Health Security, IBBIS, and SecureBio can be found in our June issue.

The Biosecurity Policy Unit at the Centre for Long-Term Resilience works closely with the UK Government and other stakeholders to reduce extreme biological risks.

• We published two peer-reviewed papers in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology: an original research article on AI-assisted customer verification for synthetic nucleic acid screening, and a perspective piece setting out a programme for the advanced detection of AI-enabled pathogenic threats and the gaps in current nucleic acid screening.

• Our Director of Biosecurity Policy, Cassidy Nelson, was appointed to the European Commission’s Scientific Panel of Independent Experts under the EU AI Act.

• We continued to raise the profile of AI-bio considerations in public, including commentary in The Economist on AI-enabled bioterrorism, a talk at EA Global London on AIxBio policy gaps, and a This Is Not A Drill podcast appearance.

• We expanded our Biosecurity Policy Unit with three new senior hires: Scott Allen as Associate Director, Dr Carl Mayers OBE as Senior Adviser, and Dr Michael Mahar as Senior Policy Manager.

Coefficient Giving’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 grantmaking: Senior Program Associate Eva Siegmann and (returning!) Senior Program Associate Adin Richards

• Published posts on the Defenses in Depth blog, including:

  • Andrew Snyder-Beattie on how he thinks about catastrophic biological risk (part I, part II)

  • Chris Bakerlee on 10 big projects for reducing bio x-risk

  • Adin Richards on PPE, bioshelters, and environment-to-human threats

  • Damon Binder on several topics, including vacuum decay and the prospects of an AI industrial explosion

• Recommended several grants across our portfolio, including:

  • Pivotal Research, for their Frontier Biodefense Fellowship

  • ProEquip, for general support

  • Renaissance Philanthropy, for a biosecurity accelerator

  • Blueprint Biosecurity, for grantmaking

  • Various grants supporting research on indoor biohardening against airborne pathogens, including those listed here

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 fourth Global Health Security Conference (GHS2026) convened in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 9–12 June 2026, arriving at a critical inflection point for international cooperation on health security amid a growing Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD) outbreak, mounting geopolitical pressure on multilateral institutions, and significant strain on pandemic preparedness financing.

• The conference brought together delegates from 88 countries and territories across 124 panels, 26 skills training workshops, and 11 plenary sessions spanning biosurveillance, PPE resilience, outbreak governance, deliberate biothreats, and the disruptive potential of AI and biotechnology, including emerging governance questions around mirror biology and AIxBio. GHS2026 also reaffirmed its commitment to equitable representation: 54% of delegates and 55% of speakers were women, and was fully carbon neutral.

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.

• Since January, MBDF has supported discussions at the American Association of Immunologists meeting, the National Ethics Councils Forum, and GHS 2026. In coming months we will support or co-organize meetings with Africa’s national science academies, the National University of Singapore, and the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. Selected other milestones are listed below.

• The UN SG’s Scientific Advisory Board and World Health Organization issued brief explainer articles on the risks of mirror life and the need for governance.

• The Nuclear Threat Initiative and the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association issued a Joint Statement calling on the international community to “develop national and international frameworks to guard against the risks posed by mirror life, reaffirming the shared view that such organisms should never be created”.

• The UK government’s new Biological Security Strategy Implementation Report includes commitments to work towards identifying and mitigating the risks of mirror life, including through international discussions.

The Council on Strategic Risks 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.

• Co-hosted the Global Biosecurity Accelerator’s most recent Biosecurity Dialogue in Warsaw, June 17-18, with Poland’s Ministry of National Defense. Experts and government officials engaged on ways to strengthen biodefense by leveraging public-private partnerships, better preparing for hybrid threats, examining the role of resilience in deterrence, and assessing the risks and opportunities associated with AIxBio.

• Conducted an AI-Enabled Bio-Threat interactive scenario discussion for the Congressional Staff Association on May 21.

• Kyle Wilgus shared CSR’s initial reflections on Biodefense in the FY27 Presidential Budget Request.

• Crystal Grant provided recommendations to the US FTC on revising antitrust policy to enable AI companies to address bio risks.

• CSR shed light on the seminal role of data in biotech and biosecurity in a report released June 26 by Crystal Grant, Harshini Mukundan, and Christine Parthemore.

• CSR also added France, Latvia, and NATO to our Global Biosecurity Tracker, highlighting how nations & organizations are advancing biosecurity.

Blueprint Biosecurity is a nonprofit dedicated to achieving breakthroughs in humanity’s ability to prevent, mitigate, and suppress pandemics.

• Launched Blueprint’s first request for proposals focused on pathogen-agnostic biothreat detection, with a specific focus on computational detection approaches, sample processing methods, and modeling.

• Participated in the “Building Jurisdictional Stockpile Readiness” workshop, contributing to discussions on strengthening stockpiling capabilities.

• Presented at Indoor Air 2026, the 2nd Aerosols and Microbiology Conference and the Canadian Aerosol Conference to drive broader awareness around our work in glycol vapors and far-UVC.

• Attended the Center for Cross-Sector Coordination’s inaugural symposium as a founding sponsor and member, bringing an emergency preparedness perspective to the broader conversation about supporting workforce health and resilience across critical infrastructure.

Sentinel Bio is a non-profit philanthropic fund focused on eliminating pandemic risks.

Team:

• We’re excited to welcome Emily Ge as Chief of Staff, Gianluca Bangara as Operations Lead, and Zhilin Xiao as Senior Strategy Advisor for Asia.

General:

• Claire and Joshua signed an open letter with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei urging mandatory DNA synthesis screening.

• Janika and Joshua published a field guide to DNA security with IFP.

• Joshua wrote “Owning the problem” on why focus beats breadth in philanthropy.

• Claire discussed dual-use synthetic biology on Cogs of War.

• Janika gave expert input at the German Bundestag on mitigating biosecurity risks.

We supported the following organizations across AIxBio and nucleic acid governance:

• Johns Hopkins CHS, RAND, and NTI on AI-biosecurity policy.

• Fourth Eon Bio to build function-based screening tools.

• EBRC and IBBIS to build an auditable KYC standard for synthesis providers.

• We incubated BioTrust to build KYC infrastructure for AI model providers.

FAI champions the technology, talent, and ideas essential to American prosperity, security, and flourishing; its Science & Innovation team works to modernize the institutions, incentives, and regulations governing American research and aims to pair biotechnology R&D with biosecurity policies ensuring that oversight is harmonized and responsive to emerging biotechnologies.

• FAI Senior Fellows Josh Wentzel and Dean Ball, with President Zach Graves, coorganized an open letter, signed by major AI lab CEOs, national security experts, and synthetic nucleic acid providers, in support of mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening, including recordkeeping, calling for Congress to act this session. Josh was quoted in Fortune calling the push “bipartisan, concrete, achievable, and noncontroversial”. The letter received write-ups in The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Verge, Vox, and elsewhere.

• FAI provided input for and endorsed the Engineering Biology Readiness Act and the Web of Biological Data Act.

• In collaboration with 1DaySooner, FAI hosted a June symposium for Clinical Trial Abundance, focused on reforming the clinical trial ecosystem.

• FAI’s The Frontier podcast hosted Coefficient Giving’s biosecurity lead Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Global Health Investment Corporation alum Charlie Petty, and FAI Senior Fellow Josh Wentzel to take the temperature of the biosecurity field.

You can see many additional opportunities in the Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness section of the 80,000 Hours job board.

• CLTR is building a pool of skilled contractors across our biosecurity and AI work, spanning areas such as biosurveillance and metagenomic detection, crisis-exercise design, PPE/CBRN and supply-chain resilience, and biological arms control. Expressions of interest are welcome on a rolling basis via our open call.

• MBDF is hiring for an Operations Coordinator and an Executive Director’s Associate — learn more at mbdf.org/jobs.

• NTI is looking for an Executive Assistant to the CEO.

• The Simon Institute for Longterm Governance is hiring an AI x Biosecurity Specialist.

• BioTrust, a new startup working on trusted-access for frontier AI labs, is hiring for engineers and a credentialling lead.

• Sentinel Bio is hiring a COO and Senior Program Officer for Biosecurity Chokepoints.

• Google DeepMind is hiring a Threat Modeler Lead, CBRN.

• FAI is looking for a Research Fellow in Clinical Trial Policy, and is always searching for talented people.

• Biohub (maintainer of ESMC and ESMFold2) is looking for a Staff Research Scientist, AI Safety.

• Intercept, a new $500M fund looking to end respiratory infections, has open roles for a Science Lead and Strategy & Ops.

• Blueprint Biosecurity is looking for Respiratory Protection Program Officers and Researchers for the Built Environment Program.

• Transfyr AI Fellowship: A 1-year research fellowship for exceptional graduate students to lead a project solving frontier machine learning problems that impact real-world scientific systems.

• SPAR Fellowship: apply to be a mentor by July 22 or express interest in being a mentee in the upcoming Fall 2026 cohort.

• CBAI AI x Biosecurity Fellowship: will open applications for the fall cohort later this month.

Fellowships with currently-active cohorts, which you may wish to track for future application rounds, include the Pivotal Frontier Biodefense Fellowship, ERA AI x Biosecurity Fellowship, and MATS Biosecurity.

• Apply by August 3 for the next Bluedot Biosecurity Course cohort.

• There are currently small grants available to support AI x Biosecurity research from Bluedot Impact Rapid Grants and grantmaking.ai.

• Blueprint Biosecurity launched a Request for Proposals (RFP) on pathogen-agnostic biothreat detection. Submit a 2–3-page Expression of Interest here by August 21.

• NAM’s Preparing for a Future of AI-Enabled Biology workshop will bring together experts from public health, medicine, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, biosecurity, government, and industry to explore how AI-enabled biological risks may evolve over the next decade. This hybrid event will take place on August 11-12, 2026. Learn more and register here.

• FAI is working to support the response to New World screwworm, reforms to federal science funding, and clinical trial reform. Please reach out if you’re working in these areas and would like to collaborate.

Do you have any opportunities (jobs, events, etc.) you would like to share with our network? Please email Anemone at anemofranz@gmail.com to submit them for our next issue (September 1).