Rapidly evolving wearables and 3D printed devices are among the inexpensive and portable diagnostic tools on the market today, some of which can detect and diagnose disease in less than an hour for biosurveillance.
However, developing these devices on a much greater scale for biosecurity purposes may mean creating and funding specific federal agencies to promote commercialization, according to expert testimony on Wednesday during a meeting of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense.
“How do you create incentives in the private sector to develop medical countermeasures when there may not be a market unless there is a crisis?” asked co-chair of the panel and former U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman of the experts.
George Poste, chief scientist of the Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative and former director of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, said the chief road block to creating marketable medical countermeasures is the federal funding cycle. Instead of budgets that are renewed annually, agencies should be given at least four years of funding for biosurveillance projects. Initiatives should also be granted guaranteed purchase agreements, something the federal government already initiates for smallpox therapeutics, Poste said.
He added that unsuitable commercial incentives more than a decade ago helped to contribute to the antibiotic resistance cycle being experienced today.
“You wouldn’t have to create new legislation at all,” said Geoffrey Ling, chief executive officer of Sun-Q LLC, a firm specializing in technology development for health care, emphasizing that extending funding would do little to disrupt policies already in place.
Additionally, Ling serves as Professor of Neurology and Attending Physician, Neuro Critical Care at Johns Hopkins Hospital and is founding director of the Biological Technologies Office in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Ling discussed his experience at DARPA as a model for what the federal government should do to enhance numerous agencies’ abilities in biosurveillance. Just as DARPA’s mission is to devise emerging technologies for the military, a similar organization could be created for, as an example, Health and Human Services to develop diagnostic tools for the health market, he said.
In addition, Ling and Poste told the panel that the funding for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which is responsible for the procurement and creation of countermeasures against bioterrorism, should be doubled to just under a billion dollars and would decrease costs for the commercial sector.
BARDA also has its “version” of DARPA, Ling said. The Division of Research, Innovation and Ventures, or DRIVe, aims to bring the medical and scientific communities together with government and venture capital to establish innovation in health security, such as making advancements in the treatment of sepsis, which affects 1.5 million people annually.
However, successful disease treatment as a whole is heavily dependent on the quality of the tools for early detection.
“Innovation in diagnostics is crucial in upstream biosurveillance incidents,” Poste said. “We underinvest in comparison to drugs and vaccines.”