Project Bioshield, the federal bioterrorism preparedness program that has produced effective vaccines against anthrax and Ebola, enters its third decade anticipating threats very different from those it was originally created to prepare for.
The federal program was launched in 2004, in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, partly in response to a series of mail-in anthrax attacks that occurred in 2001. Its mission was to develop medical countermeasures against potential chemical, biological, radiological and or nuclear. .
Twenty years later, countless vaccines, tests and treatments have been included in the National Strategic Stockpile.
“Over the 20 years, we have supported 39 products against these threats. We have 26 [Food and Drug Administration] approvals for 22 products,” Gary Disbrow, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), told The Hill.
Disbrow, with BARDA since 2007, played an important role in awarding the first Bioshield contract. He acknowledges that there were “some initial challenges” for the program, which have now been overcome.
When asked what he believes is Bioshield’s signature achievement, Disbrow pointed to the growth, experience and private sector partnerships the program has developed.
More recently, during the mpox outbreak, Bioshield supported the licensing of the Jynneos smallpox vaccine, which was widely used to mitigate transmission of the mpox virus. The US stockpile of Jynneos not only helped the mpox response domestically, but also helped affected countries abroad.
Although not its original intention, health care diplomacy has become a common function of the Bioshield Project.
“The initial intent was national security, to bolster national security, but these products are available and obviously we will do everything we can to help our international partners,” Disbrow said.
Although Bioshield exists under the arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security is tasked with identifying potential threats through material threat assessments.
Disbrow noted that updates may be needed, given the program’s decades-long history and the changing landscape of potential national threats.
“A lot of these material threat determinations were written in 2004, 2006,” Disbrow explained. “We live in very different times and so we need to constantly assess the threat space to ensure we are balancing the investments we have made in [material threat determinations] that already exist and then work with the intelligence community to ensure they are identifying additional pathogens that potentially pose a risk to national security.”
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