For fifty years, building a biological weapon required a nation-state laboratory and a generation of PhDs. Today a determined person can do most of it from a coffee shop.

AI can now design biological sequences. Commercial DNA synthesis ships them in ten days with screening gaps that can be worked around. Cloud laboratories will run the experiments for remote customers without asking what the experiments are for. None of it would be caught by any biosurveillance system we have today.

I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to get my head around biosecurity because I think some large, important companies are going to be built in this space over the next decade. I put together an interactive page with everything I found, and am open-sourcing it.

Link: michaelxbloch.com/biosecurity

At a high level, it digs into: the 21-step lifecycle of a biological attack with offense and defense at each step, five threat sources any durable company has to work against, eight companies I’m watching, three cautionary tales of biosecurity startups that died between crises, the five categories where I think companies can be built today, and four ways this thesis could be wrong.

A few asks: 1) if you know someone thinking about biosecurity, please send this their way. The more people I can talk to, the sharper the thesis gets. 2) if you’re building in the space, please reach out. I want to hear what I got wrong. 3) if you’re an investor with a company I should know about, tell me. Happy to chat.

The page is rev 0.1. I’ll keep updating it.

michaelxbloch.com/biosecurity