Synthetic horsepox viruses and the continuing debate about dual use research

Funding: The HPXV project is supported by funding from Tonix Pharmaceuticals Ltd. Long-term research support from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation is also gratefully acknowledged. Canada’s Human Pathogens and Toxins Act [30] is widely viewed as a model for how to manage the risks posed by pathogenic agents, partly because of the consultative way it was implemented [31]. Besides informing WHO of our research interests [7] and obtaining all of the institutional approvals needed to undertake this work, we obtained a legal review of relevant legislation, and the paper was evaluated by four Canadian federal agencies at our request. Possession of variola virus is a crime in Canada, and other countries have similar laws. Because there are DNA clone libraries [32], WHO recommends that no one should own >20% of the variola genome outside of the two authorized sites [33]. Many countries follow these policies, and some legislate greater restrictions on the size of cloned variola sequences. [...]from a biosafety and biosecurity perspective, we already have controls in place to manage the products of these technologies.