The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will cooperate with the Indian scientific community, the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), and the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) to plan and organize a workshop in India that will carry forward the discussions of a similar IAP workshop held in October 2017 in Hannover, Germany, exploring potential biosecurity concerns posed by genome editing technologies. It will also build on a South and Southeast Asian regional workshop convened by the Indian National Science Academy and NASEM in the Seychelles in 2016 on enhancing biosafety and biosecurity at biocontainment laboratories. The workshop will bring together experts from India, the United States, Europe, and South and Southeast Asia to discuss mechanisms, policies, and strategies to mitigate or prevent potential misuse of these technologies.
The planning and convening of the workshop will be led by a committee under the auspices of IAP in cooperation with the Academies, Indian partners, and EASAC. The committee will develop the agenda for the workshop and identify and invite speakers and discussants to address the following issues:
(1) the range of genome editing applications in human and non-human organisms and their technical requirements for development in order to better understand the potential for misuse;
(2) the evidence-base for near-, middle-, and long-term security considerations that may arise from these applications;
(3) technical, operational, regulatory and governance strategies that may aid the scientific and security communities in preventing or mitigating the identified biosecurity concerns.
A proceedings of the discussions during the workshop will be produced by IAP according to its policies and procedures. No Academies proceedings will be produced.