At the 2024 Global Health Security Conference,  IBBIS held a workshop on “Safeguarding nucleic acid synthesis: why and how to screen customers and orders”. The workshop included group exercises on sequence screening and customer screening.
One biologist who frequently orders synthetic DNA said the sequence screening exercise gave him new appreciation for the difficulty faced by “the other side”. The two workshop groups disagreed about which sequences should receive follow-up screening, and participants highlighted the difficulty of assessing the risks of organisms they were not familiar with.

According to another participant, “it was really useful to see how much screening can exist on a spectrum from box ticking to a more holistic assessment”. In the customer screening exercise, participants were asked to screen flagged orders from customers including an irritable toxin researcher, an enthusiastic high school student, and a co-founder of an early-stage diagnostics startup. Discussion after the exercise focused on the importance of laboratory biosafety governance and the need for clear ways for customers to prove their legitimacy.

We expect to iterate on and re-run this workshop in a virtual format ― reach out to screening@ibbis.bio if you’d like to participate.