Biosecurity in the Age of Engineering Biology
Imperial College London is convening a new Global Biosecurity Network of Excellence, a platform for action-focused, science-led research and delivery on the biological threats reshaping global health security.
We are pleased to invite you to a high-level roundtable on the margins of the 2026 United Nations General Assembly and High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, focused on the development of an AI-driven biosecurity response system.
The roundtable will bring together experts from science, health, frontier AI labs, the biotech and life sciences industry, funders, policymakers from defence to health resilience, and international organisations. A key aim is to bridge existing global health security and pandemic preparedness architecture and networks with frontier work in engineering biology and AI, connecting both to the surveillance, response, and coordination systems this new moment demands.
The challenge
Advances in engineering biology and artificial intelligence are lowering the barriers to creating biological agents, with both legitimate and malicious applications. The systems that protect us today were built to catch naturally occurring outbreaks. They are not designed for a world in which biological threats can be deliberately engineered, whether that means an altered pathogen, a novel toxin, or an agent unfamiliar enough to slip past existing detection tools. Closing that gap requires two things working together: the ability to design and test countermeasures at speed, and the intelligence to know when, where, and how to deploy them. No single institution, government, or company can build this alone.
The discussion will be structured around four areas, each intended to identify where partners in the room can contribute, and where new coalitions need to form:
- Rapid countermeasure design: How AI-driven biological design could shrink the path from identifying a threat to having a validated response ready to deploy, from years down to weeks.
- Early warning and threat intelligence: How we detect and make sense of unfamiliar biological signals early enough to act, and how we tell a genuine emerging threat apart from noise.
- Getting the response right: How new countermeasures get tested and deployed responsibly for different types of threats, under real-world constraints of supply, capacity, and public trust.
- Governance and coordinated action: What frameworks and international partnerships are needed to act with confidence before all the evidence is in.
Featured participants
Professor Hugh Brady, President, Imperial College London
Professor Karen Polizzi, Professor of Biotechnology, Imperial College London
Professor Azra Ghani, Chair in Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London
About Biosecurity at Imperial
Biosecurity in the age of engineering biology is an international issue. Effective responses require trusted partnerships between nations with aligned values, complementary capabilities, and shared commitment to open science. The United Kingdom is precisely such a partner, and Imperial College London sits at the heart of the UK’s scientific leadership in this space with strong links across the medical and life sciences spectrum including UKHSA, WHO, a network of world-leading hospitals.
Imperial was the first UK university to establish a dedicated centre for engineering biology (originally founded as a centre for synthetic biology). Furthermore, we host world-leading researchers in infectious diseases and epidemiological modelling who played a leading role internationally in the response to COVID-19 as well as a wide range of other infectious disease threats (including influenza, Ebola, mpox and Zika). Today, we hold an unrivalled position in the UK, characterised by:
- The strongest research and training pipeline in the country across these domains, spanning undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoctoral levels
- A truly multidisciplinary approach, integrating life sciences, medicine, engineering and economics
- An established base for globally funded research, that has brought in funding from the national agencies of dozens of countries, as well as from charities, multinational companies and from major international philanthropic donors and funds
- World-leading expertise in synthetic biology, infectious disease research, biomanufacturing, epidemiology and AI
- Demonstrated translational expertise both to rapidly bring countermeasure tools to fruition and in providing policy support globally
- A vibrant translational ecosystem anchored at our White City Campus, home to a growing cluster of start-ups in both engineering biology and security
- The London Biofoundry, which is one of Europe’s premier automated biology platforms, purpose-built for rapid, high-throughput biological design and testing