BiosecurityHead of biosecurity advisory panel: Board is stalling as a result of slow fed policy work

The head of a federal biosecurity advisory committee says delays in the development of a national policy on institutional oversight of risky life-sciences research are the main reason the committee has been inactive for close to two years.

The dormancy of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) was pushed into the spotlight this week with the revelation that the eleven remaining original members of the 23-member board are being replaced. The board was set up in 2005 to advise the government on biosecurity and dual-use research, meaning research that can be exploited for harm as well as good.

A CIDRAP release reports that the board, which is sponsored and convened by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has not met since November 2012. Some members have been critical of the NIH for not convening the panel more often at a time when controversial “gain-of-function” influenza research is moving forward and, most recently, lab safety lapses have been reported at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (See related story.)

Waiting for fed guidelines
Samuel L. Stanley Jr., MD, chair of the NSABB, said the other day that it appears that a delay in the development of a federal policy on institutional oversight of dual-use research of concern (DURC) is the main reason the NIH has not called the board together for so long. He is president of Stony Brook University in New York and was named to the NSABB about two years ago.

“I think the issue has been that we’ve been waiting essentially for the new federal guidelines to come out on institutional implementation of DURC policy,” Stanley told CIDRAP News. “We wanted to have a look at what the federal agencies would come up with. Our original understanding was that it would be out as long as a year ago.”

The eleven exiting board members were informed of the plan to replace them in a 13 July e-mail message from the NSABB’s executive director, Mary Groesch, Ph.D., an NIH senior advisor for science policy. In the same message, she said the NIH would soon release its final policy on institutional oversight of DURC and that the NSABB will be convened in the fall to give advice on resources that institutions will need in order to limit risks associated with such research.