26 June 2002 15:00 EST

by Tabitha M. Powledge, BioMedNet News

Senior scientists in the US yesterday prescribed an agenda for combating terrorism in a report that ranges from biomedical sciences to nuclear devices and from energy systems to information technology.

The report, Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), urges biomedical scientists to seize what it labels "urgent research opportunities."

Among these opportunities are the development of effective treatments and preventive measures for known and emerging pathogens like the hemorrhagic fevers. Other vital biomedical research tasks include new and better protective gear and sensors for emergency responders, and new and better methods and standards for filtering air against chemicals and pathogens and for decontamination, it says.

Richard D. Klausner, former head of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), now at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, describes the report as a roadmap for how to best organize and prioritize what the nation needs to achieve to protect itself with science and technology.

Klausner, who co-chaired the NAS committee that wrote the report, says most of the report's nearly 150 recommendations are aimed at the federal government because of its role in funding research.

Genome sequences for people, animals, and pathogens, along with researchers' increasing grasp of molecular mechanisms underlying pathogenesis and immune responses and new strategies for drug and vaccine design offer unprecedented ways of fighting bioterrorism, the reports points out.

"But these same developments also allow science to be misused to create new agents of mass destruction," it warns.

The US should launch genome sequencing projects for all organisms (and their natural variants) that have bioterror potential. Researchers should also investigate DNA-based vaccines more fully. They should also explore recombinant human antibody technologies and vaccines against toxins as well as pathogens.

Special research organizations with bioterror expertise should be created to grapple with both classified and unclassified issues, the report urges. They should work with both universities and government agencies and employ special mechanisms for rapid funding of external research.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) also needs a new mechanism for funding high-risk, long-term, high-payoff projects, according to the NAS report. The NIH, for its part, says the report is under review, and it is too soon to know how the agency will respond to that proposal. The NIH is already facing possible transfer of all its bioterror research to the new Department of Homeland Security recently proposed by US President George Bush.

The NAS committee made no estimates of costs, according to Lewis M. Branscomb of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, its co-chair. But the biggest expenses are likely to come with deployment of new and existing technologies, not in research, he says.

"What's included in here for research could be done for a small fraction" of President Bush's proposed counterterrorism budget of $37.7 billion, Branscomb said.

Budget experts agree.

"My estimates for the current bioterrorism budget show that the research budget would be smaller than the implementation budget after totaling up the increased security costs, added public health infrastructure, vaccine procurement, assistance to first responders, etc.," Kei Koizumi, who heads the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told BioMedNet News.

To ensure public enthusiasm for a big, costly counterterrorism research investment, researchers and policymakers should be seeking technologies that "generate ancillary social benefits so we get more bang for the buck," Branscomb said.

Emphasizing spillover benefits could help to persuade the public and politicians to support the initiatives, the report counsels. For example, it suggests, improved monitoring and detection of biowarfare agents would probably generate new ways of diagnosing disease. And money spent on coordinating and developing emergency teams would improve response to natural disasters and disease outbreaks as well as to terrorist attacks.

Because of substantial uncertainties about mechanisms of pathogenesis, researchers should design new experiments with virulent organisms and new animal models of human disease, the report urges.

After reviewing what is known about pathogenesis and host response for existing bioterror agents, policymakers should put together an action plan for lab research. This research, using the latest tools of molecular biology, should be designed to identify an agent's points of vulnerability. It should also identify new targets for diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines.

Boosting R&D on therapeutics and vaccines should mean increased support of both basic and clinical research, the report says. Researchers ought to focus on discovering molecular targets in bacteria and viruses, on developing broad-spectrum antivirals and antibiotics, and on treatments that enhance or stimulate protective host responses, it suggests.

That also means using genomics to identify engineered mutations and altered virulence factors rapidly, and even creating "a generic platform to develop a vaccine against recombinant pathogens."

The report stresses the need for microbial forensics as a way of identifying the source of bioweapons attacks. But forensic techniques might also help to deter them, it argues. Combining DNA sequence information and introduced DNA markers to label each pathogen with a unique tag should make the pathogen, and its source, instantly recognizable. Defense and national security agencies should take the lead in establishing this new field, the report says.

The NAS report also urges what it calls "streamlined" testing and regulation. This would include exceptions to regulations for therapeutics and vaccines against bioterror agents. Streamlining procedures would also include indemnifying producers against legal action in the case of adverse effects, it says. "The possibility of encouraging collaboration between pharmaceutical companies in this area by waiving antitrust restrictions - in specific cases justified by the national interest - must also be considered," the report notes.

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See also:
Bioterrorism: responding to an emerging threat
[Opinion]
Margaret A. Hamburg
Trends in Biotechnology, 2002, 20:7:296-298

Whole genome amplification - applications and advances
[Review]
Trevor L. Hawkins, John C. Detter and Paul M. Richardson
Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 2002, 13:1:65-67

Multigene engineering: dawn of an exciting new era in biotechnology
[Review]
Henry Daniell and Amit Dhingra
Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 2002, 13:2:136-141

Three steps to targeting anthrax toxin
[Journal Club]
Jodi Lindsay
Trends in Molecular Medicine, 2002, 8:1:6

2001: a year of major advances in anthrax toxin research
[Review]
Michael Mourez, D. Borden Lacy, Kristina Cunningham, et al.
Trends in Microbiology, 2002, 10:6:287-293
 

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