October 24, 2022

HSP Offered Participation Grants for the APBA’s 15th Annual Biosafety Conference

HSP supported 101 laboratory workers, researchers, faculty members, and other public health professionals from 63 universities, diagnostic laboratories, hospitals, and public health reference laboratories for virtual participation in the Asia-Pacific Biosafety Association’s 15th Annual Biosafety Conference and pre-conference workshops on September 21 – 25, 2022. The conference included sessions on building global resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, material control and accountability (MC&A), collection, packaging, and shipping of COVID-19 samples, diagnosis, and monitoring of SARS-CoV2. The pre-conference workshops covered ISO 35001:2019 on biorisk management for laboratories and other associated organizations, risk assessment and biosafety challenges in the GMP manufacturing world. The conference provided the HSP-supported attendees with great learning opportunities.


The participants expressed their views about the conference in a post-conference feedback form. Some of these responses are: “I am lucky to get a chance to learn about different techniques of biosafety and biosecurity adopted by different Asia Pacific countries to respond to the most recent pandemic. As a microbiologist, the measures of global preparedness for any such unseen threat were a special thing for me at this conference.” “This was an excellent conference which attracted the scientific community of a wide array.” “The most interesting part was the architectural designs of the different laboratories presented by architecture engineers. We had already learnt so much about biosafety and biosecurity in different webinars but architecture designs of existing laboratories globally were new for me.” “I found it very informative how different countries tackle the problem of the Coronavirus pandemic and what different kinds of biosafety and biosecurity measures they adopted. I also found it very interesting that research on highly infectious pathogens or newly emerging pathogens is now getting more important and new laws and legislations are being implemented to manage associated biorisks.”