Facing the 2020 pandemic: What does cyberbiosecurity want us to know to safeguard the future?

Abstract

As the entire world is under the grip of the Coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19), and as many are eagerly trying to explain the origins of the virus and cause of the pandemic, it is imperative to place more attention on related potential biosafety risks. Biology and biotechnology have changed dramatically during the last ten years or so. Their reliance on digitization, automation, and their cyber-overlaps have created new vulnerabilities for unintended consequences and potentials for intended exploitation that are largely under-appreciated. Herein, I summarize and elaborate on these new cyberbiosecurity challenges, (1) in terms of comprehending the evolving threat landscape and determining new risk potentials, (2) in developing adequate safeguarding measures, their validation and implementation, and (3) specific critical dangers and consequences, many of them unique to the life-sciences. Drawing upon expertise shared by others as well as my previous work, this article aims to summarize and critically interpret the current situation of our bioeconomy. Herein, the goal is not to attribute causative aspects of past biosafety or biosecurity events, but to highlight the fact that the bioeconomy harbors unique features that have to be more critically assessed for their potential to unintentionally cause harm to human health or environment, or to be re-tasked with an intention to cause harm. I conclude with recommendations that will need to be taken into consideration to help ensure converging and emerging biorisk challenges, in order to minimize vulnerabilities to the life-science enterprise, public health, and national security.

Advances in Synthetic Biology and Biosafety Governance

“…Cyberbiosecurity has been proposed as an emerging hybridized discipline which encompasses cybersecurity, cyberphysical security, and biosecurity as applied to biological and biomedical-based systems, and was defined as "understanding the vulnerabilities to unwanted surveillance, intrusions, and malicious and harmful activities which can occur within or at the interfaces of comingled life and medical sciences, cyber, cyber-physical, supply chain and infrastructure systems, and developing and instituting measures to prevent, protect against, mitigate, investigate and attribute such threats as it pertains to security, competitiveness and resilience" (Murch et al, 2018). A more comprehensive definition of cyberbiosecurity is given by Peccoud et al (2018), who consider that any unforeseeable adverse consequences fostered by the cyber-physical interface can be regarded as a kind of cyberbiosecurity, not merely behaviors related to intentional forms of misuse (Mueller, 2021).…”

“…At the same time, intentional data-information errors in information technology have the potential to cause major security problems in biology. With the increased automation of life sciences, the convergence of new biotechnology and information technology may have even more serious consequences (Dunlap and Pauwels, 2017;George, 2019;Murch and DiEuliis, 2019;Mueller, 2021). In the fourth industrial revolution, the intelligent and its connections to biolabs open the risks of nefarious use to engineer or edit biological agents or toxins.…”

Differentiated impacts of human interventions on nature

“…The addition of the last herbicide resistant variety is not the same as adding the first herbicide resistant canola variety to a field independently of the process being SDN-1 or SDN-3 for either plant. Risk-tiered approaches assume an indefinite social license to operate products in environments that were possibly not even imagined much less existed outside the hypothetical class of what could be made using "conventional" methods (Mueller, 2020).…”

“…Second, when the potential to cause harm or improve safety describes a relational scale, the property of scalability may be used to inform an improved structure for the regulation of gene technology including new editing and silencing techniques. Effects that scale with application have been drivers of public and scientific concerns about gene technology (Mueller, 2020), but currently proposed or adopted regulatory triggers for the new techniques often fail to link them with these relevant scales.…”

Assessing the Role of Cyberbiosecurity in Agriculture: A Case Study

“…The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the value of digitized biodata due to the research to understand the virus and the development of vaccines and other biological response mechanisms built on biodata. This is followed by a call to action for organizations to reallocate resources into understanding and improving cyberbiosecurity, both for preventing another viral or zoonotic-associated pandemic event, such as we are experiencing with Covid-19, from happening ( Mueller, 2020 ), as well as protecting the integrity of the biological data and the systems in which that data is generated, validated, shared, and used for decisions.…”