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Coefficient Giving
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Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness

We support work to guard against catastrophic biological risks, especially ones from advanced technology.

  • 140+
    grants made
  • $230+
    million given

Contents

About the Fund

Team

Partners

Interested in providing funding within this space? Reach out to partnerwithus@coefficientgiving.org.

Disease outbreaks have been responsible for some of the deadliest events in human history. Over five years, COVID-19 caused tens of millions of excess deaths and shrank the global economy by tens of trillions of dollars. But that was far from a worst-case scenario: advances in biotechnology and AI could make future biological risks even more severe than natural diseases. These risks could be among the greatest threats to society — capable of derailing centuries of progress or even causing human extinction.

Since our work on biosecurity began — five years before COVID-19 — we’ve been supporting research, technology, and policy initiatives aimed at preventing these risks and mitigating their consequences, with a particular focus on technological risks. Access to the right tools and knowledge could save millions of lives in future catastrophic biological events.

Our grantees’ work includes:

  • Developing widespread affordable respiratory protection to protect healthcare staff and other essential workers in the event of a pandemic.
  • Advancing defensive technologies like metagenomic sequencing to detect pathogens and Far-UVC light to disinfect shared spaces.
  • Improving governance and security, through stronger international norms on biological weapons, dual-use research oversight, mirror bacteria, and DNA synthesis screening. 

Research & Updates

  • Blog

    The Four Pillars: A Hypothesis for Countering Catastrophic Biological Risk

    Andrew Snyder-Beattie — who leads Coefficient Giving’s Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness Fund — outlines a hypothesis for four ‘pillars’ of biodefense that should work against even the most sophisticated engineered pathogens (or ‘unknown unknowns’).

    Read more

  • Podcast

    Andrew Snyder-Beattie on the Low-Tech Plan To Patch Humanity’s Greatest Weakness

    Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks is difficult bordering on impossible, making bioweapons humanity’s single greatest vulnerability. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom could be wrong.

    Listen to the podcast

  • News

    New York Times: A 'Second Tree of Life' Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn

    Research on so-called mirror cells, which defy fundamental properties of living organisms, should be prohibited as too dangerous, biologists said.

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