Lab safetyIt’s Time to Talk about Lab Safety

Published 21 June 2021

A new website, GlobalBioLabs.org, is an interactive web-based map of global Biosafety Level 4 facilities and biorisk management policies. Only 17 of the 23 countries that house BSL-4 laboratories have national biosafety associations or are members of international partnerships.

Dr. Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security at King’s College London, and Dr. Gregory Koblentz, Director of Biodefense Graduate Program, have launched GlobalBioLabs.org, an interactive web-based map of global Biosafety Level 4 facilities and biorisk management policies.

Lentzos told Pandora Report that the aim of the project is to “increase public knowledge about Biosafety Level 4 labs, and importantly, to strengthen national and international virus management policies.”

In their research, the two scholars found that there is “significant room for improvement in the policies in place to ensure that these labs were operated safely, securely and responsibly.” Regardless of the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the risk of laboratory accidents and incidents rises as the number of laboratories in the world expands. The new map includes 59 laboratories, the majority of which are in Europe with a total of 25 labs. Only 17 of the 23 countries that house BSL-4 laboratories have national biosafety associations or are members of international partnerships. About 60 percent of BSL4 labs are government-run public-health institutions, leaving 20% run by universities and 20 percent by biodefence agencies.

Only three of the 23 countries with BSL4 labs – Australia, Canada and the U.S.– have national policies for the oversight of dual-use research.

The primary concern is that an accident could trigger the next pandemic. At a national level, Koblentz and Lentzos recommend that “countries with BSL-4 labs should have whole-of-government systems that can conduct multidisciplinary risk assessments of proposed research for safety, security and dual-use activities, such as certain gain-of-function research, that have significant potential to be repurposed to cause harm.” At the international level, they recommend that “structures be put in place to systematically oversee maximum containment facilities.”