Biosecurity with a Builder Hat On
Why Vigilance is the logical next step in a quest for responsible innovation
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years thinking about a deceptively simple question:
What does it actually take to be ready?
Not ready in the way we talk about readiness in policy documents or board decks. Not ready in the abstract sense where everything lines up neatly on a slide and the arrows all point in the right direction. I mean ready in the only way that actually matters—when something happens, and you don’t get to ask for more time.
Because biology doesn’t wait.
It doesn’t wait for procurement cycles or regulatory alignment or whether the right stakeholders have been brought into the conversation. It doesn’t wait for us to finish debating the right governance model. It just moves. And increasingly, it moves faster than the systems we’ve built to respond to it.
That gap—between how fast capability is moving and how slow our response systems are—that’s been the throughline of almost everything I’ve written in TCIP this year.
We’ve talked about responsible innovation, but not as an abstract ethical framework. As something operational. Something that shows up in timelines and supply chains and decision latency. We’ve talked about biomanufacturing reindustrialization, not as a nostalgic return to manufacturing, but as a recognition that if you can’t make things—reliably, domestically, and at speed—you don’t actually control the system you’re operating in.
And underneath all of that has been a growing realization that we’ve built a world optimized for a version of biology that no longer exists.
You can see it if you rewind just a few years
In 2019, there was a clear recognition—at least in parts of the government—that biology was becoming programmable. That the ability to engineer and manufacture biological systems at scale wasn’t just scientific progress, it was industrial capability. That realization came with a quiet but important implication: the United States needed a biotechnology industrial base that could operate at the speed the mission demands.
Then 2020 happened, and whatever ambiguity remained disappeared.
COVID didn’t introduce new problems. It exposed the ones we had already embedded into the system. Supply chains that looked efficient on paper but collapsed under stress. Timelines that were acceptable in a world of incremental progress but completely misaligned with a rapidly moving threat. A complete absence of surge capacity when it actually mattered.
We had built a system optimized for cost.
We had convinced ourselves that efficiency was the same thing as effectiveness.
And when the system was tested, it behaved exactly as designed—slow, fragmented, and brittle.
Over the past few years, there’s been a real response to that realization. The establishment of the NSCEB. The final report. The BIOSECURE Act. A growing recognition that biology isn’t just a scientific domain—it’s economic infrastructure, it’s national security, it’s geopolitical leverage.
But if you spend enough time close to these efforts, you start to see where the limits are.
Policy can set direction. It can create incentives. It can even force certain behaviors at the margins.
But policy doesn’t build systems.
And what we are missing right now isn’t awareness. It isn’t intent. It isn’t even capital.
It’s execution.
Execution at the speed of the problem.
At the same time, the underlying technology is moving in the opposite direction. AI is compressing discovery cycles. Automation is scaling experimentation. The barriers to generating biological capability are dropping in ways that would have been hard to imagine even a decade ago.
Which creates a dynamic that should make us all a little uncomfortable.
The cost and speed of creating capability is collapsing.
The speed of organizing a response is not.
That’s what I’ve been describing as the collapse of proportionality. The relationship between risk and response is breaking. Small events can scale faster than institutions can react, and the traditional assumption—that we can control access to capability tightly enough to prevent misuse—becomes less and less defensible over time.
So the problem shifts.
From trying to prevent everything, to being ready to respond to anything.
And that’s a very different system than the one we’ve built.
The old model was coherent in its own way. It was optimized for a world where biology was slow, expensive, and centralized. Discovery happened in sequence. Manufacturing was fragmented and often offshore. Modalities were siloed. Timelines stretched across years, and that was acceptable because nothing was moving fast enough to make that a liability.
That world is gone
What’s emerging in its place looks fundamentally different. Systems that are integrated rather than fragmented. Domestic and allied supply chains rather than globally optimized for cost alone. Multi-modality approaches that can adapt to different types of threats without starting from scratch each time. And most importantly, timelines that compress from years into weeks or months, because they have to.
But you don’t get from one system to the other by coordinating better.
You get there by building something new
That realization has been sitting with me for a while now, across every role I’ve had over the past few years. Government, large tech, biotech companies—it doesn’t really matter where you look. The pattern is the same.
We are very good at generating capability.
We are much less good at organizing ourselves to use it when it matters.
It’s that gap—the space between fragmented excellence and coordinated execution—that I’ve spent my career working on.
At the Department of Defense, it was taking incredible work happening across different groups—each doing meaningful, high-quality work in isolation—and aligning it into something that could function as an enterprise strategy.
At Avidity, it was the same pattern in a different form. Building an AI strategy that wasn’t just a collection of tools or pilots, but something that actually connected R&D, clinical, CMC, regulatory, and the broader organization into a coherent system that could move faster because it was aligned.
Different domains. Same problem.
You don’t win by having isolated pockets of excellence.
You win by connecting them.
By aligning them to a common strategy.
By turning capability into coordinated action.
Because when you look at the current state of the bioeconomy—and especially biosecurity—it’s not that the capabilities don’t exist. They do. Across companies, across government, across academia. Incredible people doing important work.
But too often, it’s still fragmented.
Too slow to coordinate.
Too hard to integrate.
Too reactive when it needs to be proactive.
It’s the space between having a sequence and having a solution. Between having a platform and having a response. Between knowing what to do and actually being able to do it in time.
And it’s not an abstract gap. It’s measured in weeks and months, in whether something gets contained early or turns into something much harder to control.
That’s the gap Vigilance is focused on
On paper, it’s straightforward enough. A division focused on biosecurity and rapid therapeutic response. Built on top of Alloy’s platform, leveraging AI to accelerate development timelines, strengthening supply chain resilience, and working across government, industry, and global health partners to be ready for emerging biological threats.
But that description doesn’t quite capture why this matters—or why this is so clearly the right next step for me.
Because what Alloy has built is already something rare.
An ecosystem that spans modalities, integrates AI into discovery, connects into manufacturing, and brings regulatory expertise into the process early. A system that, on its own, is already more integrated than most of what exists in the space today.
What hasn’t existed—until now—is a way to align that entire system around a mission like this.
Around readiness.
Around the idea that when something happens, you don’t start from zero. You don’t assemble a response ad hoc. You don’t figure out who to call or how to coordinate or how to move from sequence to solution.
You’re already positioned.
Pre-built. Pre-integrated. Pre-aligned.
Ready.
I like to think of Vigilance as a new front door to a house that the team has already built.
It’s a whole-of-Alloy approach to a problem that requires exactly that—alignment across capabilities that already exist, but haven’t yet been fully orchestrated toward this mission.
And if I step back, that’s the throughline.
From DoD, to Avidity, to now.
Find systems full of smart, driven people doing great work—but not yet connected.
Align them to a shared objective.
Build the connective tissue that allows them to operate as one.
Do it with people who are exceptional at what they do, and make the system itself the advantage.
That’s what I do.
And it’s why this is such a clear “Why Alloy” moment for me.
Because the pieces are here.
The people are here.
The platform is here.
And the moment is here.
The global bioeconomy is accelerating. The policy environment is shifting. The need for domestic, integrated, rapid-response capability is no longer hypothetical—it’s immediate.
And at the same time, the cost of generating biological capability is dropping, which means more actors, more experimentation, more potential points of failure—or opportunity.
That combination doesn’t leave a lot of room for hesitation.
It creates a narrow window where you either build the systems that can operate in that world, or you accept that you’ll be reacting to it from behind.
For me, this isn’t a pivot.
It’s the continuation of the same work, just at the point where it matters most.
At some point, understanding stops being enough.
Because readiness isn’t a plan. It’s something you build before you need it.
And because understanding a system doesn’t change it. Building does.
-Titus