Sunday, March 26, 2023

Very Brief Blog: White House 60-page Report on Biotechnology, Genomics Goals

The White House has released an inter-agency, 64-page new report on its goals for the biotechnology industry as a whole, including genomics.

  • Find the PDF report here.
  • See also a review at Genomeweb, which may be open access, here.
  • Coverage also at Forbes, here.
The report has been summarized as including, "next-generation biomarkers of health, advancing cell therapies, improving AI-driven drug development, enhancing gene editing, sequencing the genomes of a million microbial species...[and] standards, benchmarks, data security, and privacy standards for multiomics, [and] integrate multiomics data into EHR systems." 

Recall that the Biden administration had an executive order reflecting its enthusiasm for biotech last fall in 9/2022 here.   New White House fact sheet here.
 

A GPT4 summary of the press release states,
  • The Biden-Harris Administration has announced new goals and priorities to advance American biotechnology and biomanufacturing, in response to the President's Executive Order to advance biotechnology and biomanufacturing innovation for a sustainable, safe, and secure American bioeconomy. The announcements aim to strengthen America's bioeconomy, rebuild supply chains domestically, and support the innovation ecosystem while ensuring all that is invented in the United States can be made in the United States. 
  • The announcements include 
    • releasing a new report outlining a vision for harnessing biotechnology and biomanufacturing research and development (R&D) to achieve societal goals; 
    • establishing biomanufacturing priorities for the Department of Defense; and 
    • assessing the economic value of the nation's bioeconomy. 
    • Other deliverables, such as a plan to expand training and education opportunities and a national strategy for expanding domestic biomanufacturing capacity, are in development.