center-of-excellence-for-engineering-biology

Center of excellence for engineering biology

Nancy J. Kelley

There has been questions about the governance of gp-write in general. I am not going to spend a huge amount of time, but I'll tell you some of the thoughts we have around how the governance is evolving. Some of the people working with me on this project have been working for over a year to do research and do analysis on large-scale international projects such as the human genome projects and a number of other big projects.

We have tkaen a number of ideas from there in terms of thikning about how to govern this and what kind of charters and documentation we should put in place in order to move forward. The thinking would be that there would be 5 governance committees, the scientific executive chaired by Jef and George, tha twould be resposible for making a scientific roadmap for the project and make sure that the projects are achieving the milestones, reviewing and selecting pilot projects, and addressing any issues of safety and compliance as they arise. In addition to that committee, perhaps an international advisory committee, a clinical advisory board, an industry adivsory board, and a social ethical and legal oersight board. You met two of the co-chairs of that board this morning.

The industry advisory board is something we're going to work hard on; Andrew Hessel and Autodesk were instrumental in providing a leadership role for industry involvement in this project. Labcyte has approached the project with a multi-year commitment and we're going to be using our best efforts to negotiate an ongoing relationship with them and GP-write. We will be reaching out to other companies as well that might want to participate, such as technology companies, or companies in relevant areas to the project like agriculture.

Supporting the work of these five advisory committees would be seven working groups. Each of those committees will have their own charters, so they will be drafted and commented on and formally approved so that everyone knows the rules and they would be put up on the website.

We started th work of 7 working groups last week we had the first phone call for each of them. Many of you participated in those calls. Really exciting conversations about a number of areas related to GP-write around technology development. Jeffrey Schloss who led tech deelopment for human genome project will also be working with GP-write. Infrastructure development-- one is the test-design-build facility platform, automating it to the point where it can scale, and also the information technology infrastructure, Chris Dwain who built the information tech systems at NY genome center with me and later led the .. IT department... has agreed to lead that effort. Jason Bobe and Brian Bott from Sage will also be participating in that.

We have safety engineering with F Isaacs. We have standard controls and reporting by NIST. Intellectual property-- lively discussion last week on the phone. And we're going to be hearing more about that tomorrow who is from MPEG-LA... and someone who has very different ideas about IP. We had a great initial conversation about that last week. Public communications and outreach, Jeffrey B will be speaking about that tomorrow on hte roadmaps. He has an interesting experience with the project because last year after the firestorm of press publicity around secret meeting creating humans without parents... Jeffrey was actually concerned because he is a PhD student and interested in science communications and clealry understood that something had gone awry here. What went on? And he wrote the first balanced piece that came out after the meeting even before the science commentary was published. There was also some interesting conversation about how to democritaize public communication to take it out to the country where the people are, not just immenatiting from Boston and NY. And also policy development working group.

What we're looking at and talking to some of the scientists about, how to create... finding a way to create a data sharing system that will allow everyone to utilize the data generated from this project and to make it freely accessible. Chris Dwon, the group had a conversation about that, and designing a system like that. He'll talk about that otmorrow afternoon.

Now that we have eeryone organized and proper leadership in place, we'll be able to go out for funding now, we're in dicussions with several large funders that are interested in supporting the project. We spoke to all the federla agencies, and state and local agencies. We will also be reaching out to philanthropic supporters and additional industry partners. The way that we can help all of you to receie funding is we can support any projects that you have in mind, we're happy to write letters of support and speak to funding agencies on your behalf and how this relates to the broader project. That can happen, you can either apply yourself or you can apply in partnership with the center, or through your own universities and we are happy to support those applications as well.

I just want to-- especially for the funders that are in the room. I want to point out that a project like this has significant economic impacts in terms of raised taxes, jobs created, people educated, and building productive futures. And that will happen with this project as well. We're very excited with the initial interest from public institutions and private companies, stay tuned we will have good news to share very soon.