Lessons learned from COVID-19 vaccines could advance synthetic biology. Here's how

Recent debates around how intellectual property rights (IPRs) might be adapted to facilitate wider availability of COVID-19 vaccines constitute a “hinge event” with the potential to alter the mental models and practices in a wide range of science and technologically intensive fields.

The international community has scolded or encouraged wealthy countries to take up their responsibilities and introduce mechanisms for affordable and equitable access to vaccines as public goods. We have seen the return to loud and boisterous activism, most notably the Vaccines for All campaign which has organized protests in London and other cities.

Synthetic Biology (SynBio) is a field combining principles of biology and engineering and shares many features with vaccines. SynBio is used to produce food and enhance nutritional value, create animal feed, medicines, biomaterials and for environmental remediation using algae or bacteria. Like vaccine production, quality requirements for SynBio are high, infrastructure is expensive, technological knowledge is becoming more specialized over time, and there are often long gestational periods and considerable financial risks involved in investment. These limitations lend themselves to terrains where industry actors use intellectual property (IP) regimes to assert and defend rights over technological knowhow.

This traditional approach to securing and protecting IP has the effect of limiting access, adoption and dissemination of technologies, which is why this has become a point of contention in the COVID-19 vaccine global conversation.

Vaccine production is highly concentrated in a few countries around the world especially for those produced using mRNA technologies. The approach taken to increasing global distribution has so far focused largely on persuading vaccine manufacturers to waive IPRs so that their products can be manufactured in other sites.

Those arguing against this option suggest that IPRs are necessary as an incentive for research and discovery that led to the mRNA vaccines. Our intention is not to delve too deeply into the details of the COVID-19 vaccine discussion, as we write more options are being added to the mix.

We are encouraged by the recent announcements of production hubs in Senegal and South Africa for the manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines through public, private and academic partnerships and believe this offers an example for global diffusion of other technologies such as SynBio.

We will point the way for diffusion of SynBio, currently concentrated in very few countries, using market and non-market mechanisms.

SynBio tools and technologies can spread more effectively around the world by widening the manufacturing base for products and services. Achieving this requires genuine partnerships that pay more than lip service to equity and take seriously the question: “Whose greater good are we prioritizing?”

Achieving this transformation is a tough ask in a field that bears all the hallmarks of elitism and hyper-concentration. The recent marked increase in interest from investment firms – venture capitalists in particular – is likely to accentuate concentration and further limit progress unless we can encourage openness, technological independence, and democratization of emerging technologies.

Another vision of a liberated Synbio is possible, one that prioritizes circular economic systems, data sovereignty and humanitarian development. To achieve this will require shifts in mindset and definitions of success. That’s what we turn to now.

Central to achieving these outcomes is the recognition that across the planet, there are cosmologies and epistemologies such as indigenous ways of knowing and place based innovation which are not being fully tapped. Moving beyond the hierarchy that sets out Western knowledge as the prize and other knowledges as less important will be key. We believe that ways of knowing and doing that have been marginalized, silenced, rendered invisible are likely to add considerable value to shaping SynBio and diffusing its valuable outputs around the world. It is these systems of knowing now denoted as “local”, “grassroots” or “indigenous” through coloniality that may in fact have a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities for inter species, man-nature co-evolution and co-existence.

In this reordering, knowledge that is not only profit seeking will be generated and deployed. When technologies are produced according to the rules of an extractive economic system, as we have seen in vaccines and the climate, the results are not only suboptimal but accelerates the destruction of an already very fragile natural ecosystem.

We do not pretend to have all the answers. Our intention is to invite the global community to reimagine SynBio as contributing to solutions that disrupt rather than protect the status quo. We aim to do this by undertaking research, opening up conversations, engaging in dialogue and taking collective action to design better solutions. If we succeed, then beyond the tangible products and services with their associated economic benefits and multiplier effects, we will have cracked the code of elite science, potentially resulting in healthier avenues for place based innovation and an even healthier economic ecosystem and planet.