The Biodefense Knowledge Center (BKC) provides the homeland and national security communities with all-source assessments and data analysis tools to help anticipate, prevent, characterize, and respond to an attack using biological agents. BKC analysts have written more than 500 all-source technical assessments and reports for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the interagency on topics germane to biological warfare or biodefense. Examples of BKC assessments include:
- Awareness Bulletins, which support tracking emerging dual-use biotechnologies of concern
- A Biothreat Agent Factbook on 73 agents, which is regularly used by federal and state agencies
- Material Threat Assessments, which inform high-level DHS and Department of Health and Human Services policy decisions regarding procurement of medical countermeasures for the U.S. strategic national stockpile
The BKC also maintains an advanced, large-scale, all-source bio-data platform available to serve the interagency. Integrated tools allow analysts to fuse, process, and visualize biodefense information. The system:
- Contains more than 40 million interagency documents, and is capable of processing more than 1 million documents per hour;
- Indexes for than 30 heterogeneous scientific data sources from DHS, NBACC, CDC, NIH, FDA, USDA, WHO, and other USG agencies, and is available for interagency use at multiple classification levels
- Supports custom data exports for security applications, such as with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center to improve automated screening processes for potential terrorists and terrorist weapons.
