A robust biodefense plan must be anticipatory, flexible, and rapidly responsive. It should exploit crosscutting technologies and cross-disciplinary scientific insights and use broadly applicable platforms and methods that offer substantial scalability.

Examples include the use of “lab-on-a-chip” technology, based on advances in microfluidics, for rapid, sensitive, point-of-care diagnostics; computational approaches for predicting drug-ligand interactions; genomic tools such as microarrays and genome-wide screening for protective antigens; and automated robotic systems for rapid, high-throughput drug screening and the scale-up of vaccine production.