IBBIS participates in launch of Asia Centre for Health Security
Piers Millett, IBBIS Executive Director, participated in the launch of the new Asia Centre for Health Security in Singapore on 17 April 2024. The centre is a new academic think tank working towards forestalling and alleviating the impact of biological threats of the future, through collaborative research and capacity development in systems evaluation and strengthening in Asia. Based at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the centre operates in close partnership with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University.
The launch event was opened by by Adjunct Professor Derrick Heng, Deputy Director-General of Health at the Singapore Ministry of Health. He noted “ACHS would be a useful complement to the evolving public health ecosystem in Singapore and the region’s push for improved health security”.
IBBIS is exploring how we might work together with ACHS, in particular on gene synthesis screening. During the event, Professor Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recalled “we need to make sure these technologies don’t lead to big accidents and are not used as weapons against us… This requires the set-up of good scientific governance and “common sense screening systems that keep people with bad intent from creating dangerous viruses from scratch”.
The launch event was opened by by Adjunct Professor Derrick Heng, Deputy Director-General of Health at the Singapore Ministry of Health. He noted “ACHS would be a useful complement to the evolving public health ecosystem in Singapore and the region’s push for improved health security”.
IBBIS is exploring how we might work together with ACHS, in particular on gene synthesis screening. During the event, Professor Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, recalled “we need to make sure these technologies don’t lead to big accidents and are not used as weapons against us… This requires the set-up of good scientific governance and “common sense screening systems that keep people with bad intent from creating dangerous viruses from scratch”.