Expert Interview: Harshi Mukundan

Dan Krotz: 

Hi, this is Dan Krotz with Berkeley Lab’s Strategic Communications team. I’m here today with Harshi Mukundan, who joined Berkeley Lab a few years ago to work jointly in the Office of National and Homeland Security and the Biosciences Area. She has two roles at Berkeley Lab. One is to facilitate the strategic leadership and development of programs across the lab in the biosecurity space. She also conducts infectious disease research.

Welcome Harshi, and to get things started, my first question is kind of broad: So what is biosecurity and why is it such an important research field right now?

Harshi Mukundan: 

In a nutshell, biosecurity, as the name suggests, is securing yourself against the harmful effects of biology. These could be biological agents, intentional or accidental biological processes, anything that could harm humans or things that humans care about, such as plants, agriculture, animals, veterinary health.

There are very many reasons why biosecurity is existentially important right now. We’ve seen an incredible progress in biotechnology in the last few decades. Think of sequencing or our capabilities with DNA synthesis, genome editing, synthetic biology. The pace of innovation in technologies like this, and consequently the impact on the market, is high, and this is even further accelerated by cross-cutting capabilities such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. This convergence of disruptive deep tech: biotech with cross-disciplinary innovations like AI ML is unique to our time and it presents an extremely valuable opportunity for us. But by the same definition, there’s also risk of misuse, and as honest keepers of technology we should be addressing the use and the risk of these emerging areas simultaneously.

Deep tech has the ability to influence not just the American but the global way of life, innovate in biomanufacturing, biodefense, and health quite significantly. And so this is a great area of focus for our science.

Another area of security is emerging infectious diseases, again, natural or engineered or accidental. We have heard about the recent threats like H5N1, but our troops deployed around the world encounter new pathogens and diseases all the time as well. And protecting against that is also biosecurity. And for all of these reasons, I think that biosecurity is an extremely important field of research right now.

Dan Krotz: 

Great. Thank you. So the next question, how are national labs and Berkeley Lab in particular uniquely positioned to contribute to biosecurity research?

Harshi Mukundan: 

By definition, national Labs are developed in order to approach the most challenging problems using team science. And the biggest risks to biosecurity now are at the convergence of different disciplines. And so I think national labs are uniquely positioned to contribute to biosecurity research because we understand the science at convergence, we understand the intersection of different disciplines, and we also think about how to take foundational science and transition it in order to ensure real world readiness, reproducibility, and translational value. The other reason the national labs are important in this role is because we are honest brokers and do not have a vested interest one way or the other in this problem except to to solve it or to address it.

Thirdly, we have unique capabilities that the US government has invested in over decades. For instance, at Berkeley Lab we have the Advanced Light Source, which allows us to perform structural interrogation of emerging pathogens or new therapeutics, or non-infectious diseases even, in ways that allows us to derive answers, which is very hard to do in routine institutions. We also hold a lot of supercomputing capabilities, computational power and science at the bleeding edge of variety of emerging technologies such as quantum and artificial intelligence. All of these factors allow us to address these kinds of challenges in a unique way using expertise in facilities.

I think the user facilities in the Department of Energy national labs are a great resource in this category. At Berkeley Lab alone, we have the Joint Genome Institute, which is home to sequencing science, starting with the Human Genome Project, but has allowed us to characterize complex sequences of living things in complex environments like soil or plants, which is a great resource to have as we tackle the question of emerging biosecurity concerns, for instance.

Dan Krotz: 

Thank you. Can you briefly discuss a few biosecurity related research projects underway at Berkeley Lab?

Harshi Mukundan: 

In terms of biosecurity work at Berkeley Lab, I think we have a lot of efforts that span different important areas of need. The first of these that I’ll mention is threat response. When you have an emerging threat, whether it’s natural or engineered accidental or intentional, you need a suite of resources to be able to identify, to characterize and develop countermeasures to it. With combination of our sequencing capabilities, our work in model systems and immunology, with contributions from our AI ML strengths and synthetic biology, we’re working on a variety of efforts that address the entire gamut of threat response that are funded by a variety of different agencies.

The second major area that I’ll talk about is in environmental biosecurity, which is the ability to interrogate and address either threats or insults in an environment, or also protect ourselves from different things that might be in the environment. These may include xenobiotics all the way from pesticides to bioremediation of certain things in soil, but also sensing and understanding signatures in an environmental matrix in a very complex background. And so we work with a lot of programs like that. And one of our strengths in this area are fabricated ecosystems and the ability to interrogate information at a systems level in a controlled environment and be able to use that to make decisions on solution development, if you will.

And the third important area is in the area of synthetic biology and biomanufacturing. And because we are home to resources such as the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Agile BioFoundry, combine them with the strength of sequencing at JGI and our depth of science in artificial intelligence and machine learning, you have a unique environment where you can actually think about making molecules, which can be therapeutic molecules or small molecules of relevance to the Department of Defense or other agencies, for instance, or understanding the processes in that context. And that’s the third area that we are contributing to.

Dan Krotz: 

Great, thank you. What are some of the future trends and challenges in biosecurity research and how is Berkeley Lab well positioned to continue to contribute to this field going forward?

Harshi Mukundan: 

I think our key strengths and why we are well positioned to do this is because of our ability to study science at the convergence of different disciplines. For instance, with our fabricated ecosystems, we are not only seeing how a particular engineered organisms can remediate a xenobiotic in soil, but also seeing how will this work in an environmental situation. What are the types of signatures? What are other impacts? How can we remedy them? How can we make this last? How can we make this sustainable?

With regards to biomanufacturing, there are different research efforts that allow people to make certain things with synthetic biology or other means. Now think about automation. By putting them together and also addressing the science of scale up is something that Berkeley Lab excels at. We have the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit that allows people to not only make things by biomanufacturing, but also ensures that it is ready for economic viability by scaling it up.

In this way by supporting industry holistically in various research efforts that we do, you are also ensuring biosecurity because you’re securing the translational value of startup and industry research, which is an economic value added for a country, and in my opinion that is also biosecurity.

Dan Krotz: 

Perfect. Thank you. Any final thoughts to relay.

Harshi Mukundan: 

I just want to say that it takes all kinds of science to actually contribute to biosecurity. We certainly have people that are thinking about the security aspects and building the security framework that is required to address it. But we also need people that are going in depth into a particular field of science in order to understand the true risks and mechanisms by which it can be secured or protected against. We also have people working at the interface of the private-public partnership in order to make sure that we are both secure and enabling robust transition of technologies in that space. So each of us has a role to play in this ethos, in this architecture.

Dan Krotz: 

Thanks, Harshi. This has been very informative. To our listeners. Be sure to check out Berkeley Lab’s website at lbl.gov to learn more about our biosecurity research and much more with Berkeley Lab’s strategic communications team. This is Dan signing off.