Artificial Intelligence and Automated Laboratories for Biotechnology: Leveraging Opportunities and Mitigating Risks--A Workshop

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Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are increasingly being used to aid biological discovery and biotechnology development. Robotic and remotely controlled equipment is being used to accelerate research, while AI is opening new opportunities to explore the natural world and inform efforts to build biological entities with useful capabilities. Such technologies are poised to drive beneficial advances in health, biomaterials, environmental remediation, biomanufacturing, agriculture, and other areas. However, these developments also raise new questions and potential risks. Researchers, policymakers, and the public have sought to examine how applying AI and automation in biotechnology might lead to new challenges for biosecurity, health and safety, the environment, the integrity of scientific data, and economic development and national competitiveness.

To examine these issues, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a workshop titled Artificial Intelligence and Automated Laboratories for Biotechnology: Leveraging Opportunities and Mitigating Risks, on April 3-4, 2024. Participants from government, academia, nonprofit organizations, and private industry communities gathered virtually and in person to explore the use of AI and automation in biological research and development; discuss considerations relevant to national security; and share perspectives on potential future pathways for technology and policy development. This Proceedings of a Workshop-in Brief provides the rapporteurs' high-level overview of the event.

Publication information

12 pages · 8.5 x 11 ·
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-71541-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/27469

Suggested citation

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2024. Artificial Intelligence and Automated Laboratories for Biotechnology: Leveraging Opportunities and Mitigating Risks: Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Amina A. Qutub

Amina Ann Qutub is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio (UTSA), the Burzik Professor of Engineering Design, assistant director of strategic partnerships and research thrust lead of the Artificial Intelligence MATRIX Consortium, Director of the UTSA – UT Health Joint Graduate Group in Biomedical Engineering, and the computational lead for the international Leukemia Protein Atlases, a clinical and engineering collaboration to identify new therapeutic targets for pediatric and adult leukemias. Bridging basic science to translational impact, she directs the Quantu Project, a nationwide study to optimize brain health over a lifespan using an integration of biosensing technology, modeling, and functional neurogenesis bioassays. She is an American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow, National Academies’ Keck Future Initiatives Awardee, The Health Cell Honoree, and National Science Foundation CAREER Awardee. Dr. Qutub received her B.S. in chemical engineering at Rice University and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Berkeley and UCSF with a major in mathematical modeling and minor in neurology. She completed her postdoc as a National Institute of Health NRSA fellow in Biomedical Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine. Dr. Qutub has served as Conference Chair and Co-Organizer for two National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine Arab-America Frontiers Symposia, participated at four other Frontiers of Engineering Symposia (Indo-American, China-America, and two additional Arab-America meetings), was a National Academy of Engineering-nominated participant in the Royal Academy of Engineering Global Grand Challenges (London, 2019), and was nominated by the National Academy of Sciences as a participant in the World Laureates Symposium (Shanghai, 2021). Dr. Qutub is a member of the Standing Committee on Advances and National Security Implications of Transdisciplinary Biotechnology. She is currently funded by the San Antonio Medical Foundation, NSF, and NIH in the fields of AI, AI-guided therapeutic discovery, automated detection of human behavior and neuroengineering, and contracted funding from the Southwest Research Institute. She has a pending patent on the development of techniques to model sensory regions of the brain and automate screening of neurological therapies, and was formerly an advisor and early employee of Rarebase, a drug development platform company that develops and uses laboratory automation.

Deepti Tanjore

Deepti Tanjore is Director of the Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and interfaces with scientists from industry, academia, and start-ups to resolve scale-up challenges for their synthetic biology–based technologies. Deepti’s interests lie in articulating industry-wide issues and developing technologies that no single company is incentivized to pursue. Her research at ABPDU focuses on modeling the impact of bioprocess conditions on microbial heterogeneity and developing in-line analytical tools for real-time adaptation of process development in bioreactors. Dr. Tanjore holds a B.Tech. degree in Chemical Engineering from Andhra University, an M.S. in Biological Engineering from North Carolina State University, and a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and is currently enrolled for an MBA from University of California - Berkeley. She is a member of the Standing Committee on Advances and National Security Implications of Transdisciplinary Biotechnology, and served as a member of the workshop planning committee in 2022 for the National Academies’ Successes and Challenges in Biomanufacturing – A Workshop. Dr. Tanjore is a co-founder of enScale Bio, a software company that enables technology transfer and scale-up of biomanufacturing based technologies and develops software workflows to collect data before, during, and after fermentation and downstream processing.

Douglas Densmore

Douglas Densmore is the Tegan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellow, a Kern Faculty Fellow, a Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow, and Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. His research focuses on the development of tools for the specification, design, assembly, and test of synthetic biological systems. He aims to raise the level of abstraction in synthetic biology by employing standardized biological part-based designs which leverage domain-specific languages, constraint-based genetic circuit composition, visual editing environments, microfluidics, and automated DNA assembly. This leads to a new research area he calls “Hardware, Software, Wetware Co-design”. He is the director of the Cross-disciplinary Integration of Design Automation Research (CIDAR) group. He was the lead PI for the NSF Expeditions “Living Computing Project” and a Senior Member of the IEEE and ACM, and a Fellow of AIMBE. He is also the founder of the “Design, Automation, Manufacturing, and Processes” (DAMP) lab. He is a cofounder and shareholder of four commercial synthetic biology-based companies (Lattice Automation, Asimov, Biosens8, and AIse Bio). He is also a cofounder and board member of the non-profit Nona Research Foundation and the non-profit Bio-Design Automation Consortium.

Jessica Erin Siegel Dymond

Jessica S. Dymond is Vice President, Technology, of IQT’s B.Next practice. In this role, Dr. Dymond provides technical and strategic leadership to identify and accelerate development of high-impact emerging biotechnologies to address critical national security challenges. In her prior role as Chief Scientist for Physical and Life Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Dr. Dymond led an active interdisciplinary research portfolio spanning technological and analytic pursuits to enhance anticipation, assessment, and mitigation of emerging biological threats, including evaluation of emerging biotechnologies’ potential impact on national security and health, and integrated health surveillance strategies to strengthen global health security. Dr. Dymond founded APL’s Biological Sciences group where she led development of technological solutions in areas such as biological sensing, biological synthesis, microbiome engineering, genomic surveillance, and others. She provided programmatic leadership in the National Health Mission Area, and served as strategy lead for global health and biological security initiatives. Dr. Dymond held a postdoctoral fellowship in functional genomics at the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service and is formally trained as a synthetic biologist, holding a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Genetics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Thomas Gregory McKelvey, Jr.

Greg McKelvey is a senior physician policy researcher at RAND. His government service includes time at the White House as Assistant Director for Biosecurity at the Office of Science and Technology Policy where he led national security governance and resilience efforts at the intersection of AI, automation, and emerging biotechnologies. He also completed a tour as product manager in the United States Digital Service where he was deployed to the Federal COVID-19 pandemic response with a portfolio that included biosurveillance, data aggregation, inference, and strategic decision support. He trained in healthcare delivery at the University of Washington and Albert Einstein College of Medicine and has held leadership roles in two venture-backed machine learning startup companies. McKelvey obtained his doctorate studying medicine at the Dartmouth Medical School, and his MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His published research covers biosecurity, pandemic response, applied machine learning, metascience, and S&T policy strategy. He was named an Emerging Leader in Biosecurity Fellow by Johns Hopkins in 2020, and a Fellow for Ending Biological Weapons by the Council on Strategic Risks in 2021 (deferred for government service). During his time at the Office of Science and Technology Policy from May 2021 through October 2023, five public policies on biosecurity, biotechnology, or AI risks from biology were released, including: American Pandemic Preparedness Plan (September 2021); Executive Order 14081: Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy (September 2022); National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan (October 2022); National Security Memorandum 15: on Countering Biological Threats, Enhancing Pandemic Preparedness, and Achieving Global Health Security (October 2022); and Executive Order 14110: Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence (October 2023).

Arvind Ramanathan

Arvind Ramanathan is a staff scientist and computational science leader at Argonne National Laboratory within the Data Science and Learning Division. He is also a senior scientist at the University of Chicago Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering (CASE). Prior to joining Argonne, he was a team lead for the Integrative Systems Biology team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His primary research interest is in the integration of generative AI and automation/robotics to scale biological experiments, particularly in the fields of synthetic biology and aiding the discovery of novel therapeutics as well as biomaterials. His group has led the development of genome-scale language models for predicting emergent variants of concern in COVID-19, and strategies for optimizing protein design by incorporating experimental feedback using reinforcement learning. His work was recognized with the IEEE/ACM Gordon Bell Prize for High Performance Computing Research for COVID-19 (2020, 2022) and he was awarded the Battelle Early Career Award (2016), the Mentor of the Year award (2017), and the DOE Secretary’s Honor Award (as part of the National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory efforts for COVID-19). He obtained his PhD in Computational Biology from Carnegie Mellon University and MS in Computer Science from Stony Brook University.

Workshop

Artificial Intelligence and Automated Laboratories for Biotechnology: Leveraging Opportunities and Mitigating Risks--A Workshop

April 3 - 4, 2024

Past

Discussion

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Materials

About

This public workshop will discuss the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated laboratories (also referred to as cloud labs, automated experimentation, and “self-driving” labs) for biotechnology. The workshop will consider opportunities to leverage AI and laboratory automation capabilities for discovery and development and opportunities to prevent the misuse of biotechnology. The workshop will also explore methods and approaches to identify, track, and forecast the domestic and international development of such technologies. The transdisciplinary workshop will convene experts across sectors and utilize expertise to highlight recent advances and explore implications for the development and use of these technologies. The workshop is being organized by a planning committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine under the auspices of the Standing Committee on Advances and National Security Implications of Transdisciplinary Biotechnology,

Confirmed Speakers and Sessions:

Keynote Speaker: Nobel Laureate Frances H. Arnold, California Institute of Technology

Session 1: Applications of AI and Automated Labs for Biotechnology

Andreas Andreou, Johns Hopkins University
Adrienne Hoarfrost, University of Georgia
Melissa Kemp, Georgia Institute of Technology
Chris Gibson, Recursion
D.J. Kleinbaum, Emerald Cloud Labs

Session 2: Preventing the Misuse of Biotechnology

James Diggans, Twist Bioscience
Charles Fracchia, Bioeconomy Information Sharing and Analysis Center (BIO-ISAC)
Tessa Alexanian, International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science (IBBIS)
Tejal Patwardhan, OpenAI

Session 3: Costs and Benefits of Investing in (or not Investing in) Technologies

Chenny Zhang, Biotechnology Venture Capital
Andy Kilianski, ARPA-H
Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling
Jolene Lau, BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc.

Sesson 4: Forecasting Developments and Assessing Capability Gaps

Erika Alden DeBenedictis, Francis Crick Institute
Ezra Karger, Forecasting Research Institute
Tamay Besiroglu, EpochAI
Philip E. Tetlock, University of Pennsylvania

Session 5: Drivers of Innovation

Theresa Good, National Science Foundation
James Wang, Creative Ventures
Rob Carlson, Planetary Technologies

Contact

Andrew Bremer

(202) 334-3376
abremer@nas.edu

Location

National Academy of Sciences Building

2101 Constitution Ave NW

Washington DC 20418, USA

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

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Artificial Intelligence and Automated Laboratories for Biotechnology: Leveraging Opportunities and Mitigating Risks--A Workshop

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Artificial Intelligence and Automated Laboratories for Biotechnology: Leveraging Opportunities and Mitigating Risks--A Workshop

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Featured publication

Artificial Intelligence and Automated Laboratories for Biotechnology: Leveraging Opportunities and Mitigating Risks: Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief

Description

Collaborators

Committee

Sponsors

Staff

Parent projects

Board on Life Sciences

Standing Committee on Advances and National Security Implications of Transdisciplinary Biotechnology

Major units and sub-units

Contact

Contact us

Provide feedback

Request materials

More like this

Standing Committee on Advances and National Security Implications of Transdisciplinary Biotechnology

National Cooperative Highway Research Program

Review of the draft United by Nature assessment

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

Life Sciences and Biotechnology Program Area

State of Human H5N1 Therapeutics: A Rapid Expert Consultation

Review of Methods in the Report on Carcinogens Handbook