Coefficient Giving’s Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team is launching a new Request for Proposals to support work aimed at preventing engineered biological threats from emerging and improving our response to these threats should prevention fail. 

Applications start with a simple expression of interest form (≤500 words), with a submission deadline of May 11 2026 at 11:59pm PT.

More details

We expect that the coming years will see unprecedented progress in AI and biotechnology. While the ability of AI systems to improve human health could be transformative, these same advances may increase existential risk via multiple pathways: AI could lower barriers for bad actors pursuing novel biological weapons, and increasingly capable AI systems may themselves leverage biotechnology in harmful ways. Separately, biotech advances could also introduce catastrophic risks from even well-intentioned actors—for example, through the creation of mirror bacteria.

We feel these problems are increasingly urgent, and our team is looking to spend more and spend faster as a result. (We expect to direct >$100 million in grants this year.)

To that end, we’re interested in funding ambitious projects in the following categories:

• Transmission suppression: Enhance society’s capacity to respond to global biological catastrophes (e.g. stockpiling PPE or developing transmission suppression technologies like air filters and disinfectant vapors)
• Tech safeguards and governance: Reduce risks from advanced biological capabilities through technical safeguards and governance of high-risk technologies, particularly at the intersection of AI and biology (e.g. synthesis screening, misuse classifiers)
• Policy and advocacy: Inform decisionmakers about risks and mitigations, support policymaking in key jurisdictions, and develop governance approaches for high-risk technologies (e.g. mirror bacteria)
• Field-building: Build the field by attracting talented people to work on these problems and fast-tracking their path to impact (e.g. fellowships, events, accelerators, media)

To learn more about our priorities and strategy, you can read our blog or listen to a recent podcast appearance by our team’s Managing Director, Andrew Snyder-Beattie. 

We encourage you to strongly consider submitting a quick expression of interest, even if you're not sure whether your project fits perfectly or is sufficiently well thought out. We’ve noticed that people with exciting proposals are often too slow to ask for funding. Anyone is eligible to apply, including those working in academia, nonprofits, industry, or independently. Please email bio-rfp@coefficientgiving.org with questions.

If you don’t have a specific project in mind but instead are an individual looking to make a career transition into biosecurity, we encourage you to apply for funding through our Career Transition Development Funding program.

Alternatively, if you are interested in potentially contributing to the field but aren’t yet ready to apply for a grant, please register your interest here.