Key anti-terrorism program Project Bioshield marks 20 years with new challenges

Project Bioshield, the federal bioterrorism preparedness program that’s yielded vaccines effective against anthrax and Ebola, heads into its third decade anticipating threats far different from those it was originally created to prepare for.

The federal program was launched in 2004, in the shadow of the Sept. 11 attacks, partly in response to a slew of mailed anthrax attacks that occurred in 2001. Its mission was to develop medical countermeasures against potential chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attacks.

Twenty years on, numerous vaccines, tests and treatments have gone into the National Strategic Stockpile.

“Over the 20 years, we have supported 39 products against these threats. We have 26 [Food and Drug Administration] approvals of 22 products,” Gary Disbrow, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), told The Hill.

Disbrow, with BARDA since 2007, played a role in awarding the first contract under Bioshield. He acknowledges there were “some early challenges” for the program, which have since been overcome.

When asked what he believes is the hallmark achievement of Bioshield, Disbrow pointed to the growth, expertise and partnerships with the private sector that the program has developed.

Most recently, during the mpox outbreak, Bioshield supported the licensure of the smallpox vaccine Jynneos that was widely deployed to mitigate the transmission of the mpox virus. Not only did the U.S.’s stockpile of Jynneos help in the mpox response domestically, but it also aided impacted countries overseas.

Although not its original intent, health care diplomacy has become a common function of Project Bioshield.

“The initial intent was national security, to bolster national security, but these products are available, and obviously we will do anything that we can to help our international partners,” Disbrow said.

While Bioshield exists under an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security is tasked with identifying potential threats through material threat assessments.

Disbrow noted that updates may be needed given the program’s decades-long history and the changing landscape of potential national threats.

“Many of these material threat determinations were written in 2004, 2006,” Disbrow explained. “We live in a much different time now, and so we need to constantly be evaluating the threat space to make sure that we’re balancing investments that we made in [material threat determinations] that already exist and then working with the intelligence community to make sure that they’re identifying additional pathogens that potentially are a risk to national security.”