Inscripta partners with you to ensure everyone’s safety
Inscripta’s biosecurity systems include procedures intended to protect our planet against potential harm from biological agents. The biorisk scenarios that are considered include:
Deliberate
- We prevent use of Inscripta technology by nefarious actors.
- We screen customers following industry best practices.
Accidental
- Biology is complex so there may be unforeseen results of certain edits.
- We screen design libraries before production using state-of-the-art biosecurity tools.
Dual Use
- We identify legitimate research that could also be used for a harmful purpose.
- We collaborate with customers to resolve issues.
Preventing biorisk while minimizing workflow impact
Our biosecurity screening goals are to ensure everyone’s safety while also having minimal impact on customer workflow.
- Proactive: Potential biorisk is identified before production of reagents.
- Speed: Screening is fast and designed to be in parallel with other processes, so that in normal situations, biosecurity does not cause a delay in ordering or manufacturing of reagents.
- Confidentiality of screening data:in silico screening is carried out in-house at Inscripta.
- Collaborative: We partner with our customers. In the event of biosecurity alerts our Customer Success Team will engage in discussion with customers to remedy the situation.
Multipronged system proactively detects and prevents biorisk
Our extensive process includes screening platform users, customers, user-uploaded genomes (e.g., from organisms that are not an Inscripta strain), as well as every design library ordered. We trust approved customers, so in silico sequence screening primarily targets accidental creation of a biorisk or a dual use scenario.
Customer Screening
- We follow industry standard practices.
- We screen customer information against government banned lists.
In-silico Screening
- We computationally screen customer genomes.
- This screening includes a first pass at biorisk detection, comparing customer genomes against known genes that may cause harm.
- The next phase of screening is an in silico screen of all customer-directed edits, using a functional biorisk prediction algorithm.
- Matches will invoke manual verification and, if warranted, our Customer Success Team will engage in discussion with the customer.
Safety and responsibility are our priorities!