Renaissance Philanthropy Opens Applications for the Biosecurity Big if True Science Accelerator
With support from Coefficient Giving, we are opening applications for a cohort to develop scalable proposals for R&D and market-shaping efforts to increase resilience to biological threats.
Engineered pathogens are one of the few threats that could credibly derail civilization. Yet by one recent count, fewer than 200 people worldwide work full-time on reducing catastrophic risks from engineered pathogens.
There is no shortage of good ideas for how to address the threat by improving our physical defenses, making the air we breathe as clean as the water we drink, improving synthesis screening or detecting outbreaks before they turn into pandemics.
The capital to confront this challenge is now finally arriving, with funders expecting to direct hundreds of millions of dollars, and plausibly billions, into biosecurity over the coming years. The bottleneck will soon be finding people with credible plans for how to deploy that capital productively.
With support from Coefficient Giving, we are addressing this issue by training a new generation of biosecurity R&D leaders via our Big if True Science (BiTS) Accelerator. BiTS is Renaissance Philanthropy's accelerator for scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs with bold ideas for transforming a field. The goal is to design actionable R&D programs that can be funded by philanthropists or supported by ARPA-style agencies.
We will select a cohort of 10-14 ambitious individuals and provide them with a structured program and one-on-one mentorship to design and implement ambitious programs to dramatically reduce the risks from engineered pandemics. Mentors in past programs included seasoned biosecurity leaders including Renee Wegrzyn, Brad Ringeisen, David Markowitz, and Sandeep Patel.
The program will culminate with a demo day where fellows get an opportunity to pitch their program ideas to prospective philanthropic funders, as well as government agencies.
This is the sixth cohort for BiTS. Partnerships so far have included a cohort with ARIA (UK), two cohorts with SPRIND (Germany), a philanthropic-focused cohort with Coefficient Giving (Americas), and a cohort with the Japan Cabinet through their Global Startup Campus Initiative. Alumni have already gone on to run €40 million R&D challenges on continuous hormone monitoring and microbial consortia, joined Google DeepMind to start their first autonomous materials science lab, started unusually ambitious R&D non-profits and startups, and are collectively raising over $20M on topics including detecting unknown pathogens or extending human performance with engineered mitochondria. In Japan, one BiTS Fellow will soon be selected as a Venture Director to lead an international research program under a Cabinet Office initiative.
Apply
The cohort will run from late October 2026 to February 2027. Applications are welcome from around the world; the program operates on US Eastern time. Apply here by 20 September 2026. For questions, contact bits@renphil.org.
Key dates
12 August: Applications open
Week of 17 August: Office Hours (in small groups, share your availability here)
18 August: Informational webinar (sign up here)
20 September: Applications close
Week of 29 September: Interviews for shortlisted applicants
9 October: Offers sent
2 to 4 November: In-person kick-off
February 2027: ExhiBiTS demo day
Priority areas
This cohort is focused on defending against catastrophe-scale risks from engineered pathogens. We also prioritize technologies and interventions that are scalable and place a premium on programs whose impact can materialize in a few years, rather than decades. Below is a non-exhaustive list of priority areas:
Transmission suppression, e.g. next-generation and stockpilable PPE, air disinfection (germicidal UV, glycol vapors, air-cleaning technologies), mucosal interventions such as drug-free nasal sprays.
AIxBio safeguards, e.g. red-teaming of AI models, rigorous dangerous-capability evaluations and uplift studies, robust misuse classifiers and safeguards on AI systems, data governance, managed access and KYC.
Engineering chokepoints, such as nucleic acid synthesis screening, benchtop synthesis security, viral cell lines, managed access and KYC.
Pathogen-agnostic detection and diagnostics, such as metagenomic sequencing or mass spectrometry.
Intelligence, attribution, e.g. OSINT and microbial forensics.
Agricultural resilience and food stockpiling.
Pathogen-agnostic day-zero medical countermeasures, e.g. innate immune vaccines, decoy receptors etc.
AI for biodefense (i.e. to accelerate the above areas)
Market shaping approaches to any of the above.