National Security Life Sciences – Biosecurity Preparedness

Los Alamos develops enduring capabilities to solve grand challenges in the biosciences

Our science enables national preparedness and response to infectious diseases and biosecurity threats by harnessing life sciences along with other innovative scientific approaches.

Biosecurity preparedness includes monitoring the environment for potential biothreats—in air, soil, plants, animals, food, wastewater, and people—detecting and mitigating threats when they arise, and predictive modeling to anticipate outcomes. Los Alamos scientists apply their established expertise in environmental surveillance, genomics, bioinformatics, protein engineering, analytics, computational and epidemiological modeling to protect the nation from biological threats.

Surveillance, Detection, Diagnostics, and Therapeutics
Our scientists are creating universal approaches for the discovery and detection of potential biothreats from any environmental sample. Our layered approach spans pathogen-agnostic surveillance to targeted pathogen analysis to innovative nucleic acid- or protein-based diagnostics and therapeutics.
Decision Support
Our scientists are constantly assessing new data streams for surveillance and developing unique bio- and health-informatics and visual analytics platforms. We create reliable, accessible decision support tools by integrating capabilities in disease biology, public health, epidemiology, medical diagnostics, statistical and computational analysis, and database management.
Predictive Modeling
Los Alamos researchers develop epidemiological models capable of incorporating disease mechanisms from diverse datasets. Our theory and modeling approaches predict disease progression in specific hosts and provide decision makers with validated epidemiological models to support situational awareness, forecast and predict disease spread, and support confident assessments.