The Service is a joint project of the Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety (INBI) and GenØk with substantial support in-kind provided by the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

The project objectives was to develop a free-to-the-public resource for the risk assessment of GMOs, accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. Policy and regulatory officials in government, NGOs, citizens, and researchers will be able to customise biosafety information from the elite scientific and technical literature and apply it to their own risk assessments or to evaluations of assessments done by others. It will help both the identification of relevant risk issues and assist with the evaluation of technical information provided in GMO import/release applications. The aim is to make it possible for a client to construct a comprehensive and context-specific assessment of this technical information, as well as to identify what additional issues or uncertainties must be addressed by either regulatory authorities or the applicant.

This phase of the project is dedicated to finalizing content and refining the prototype of the Biosafety Assessment Tool (BAT). The BAT is the means by which clients can access information and templates for customizing their own specific risk assessments or assessment evaluations. The BAT is a stand alone application through which clients interface with all information available so far under the Biosafety Forecast Service. This information includes deep subject reviews, case studies based on existing GMOs, completed risk assessments, and emerging issues of risk or social, cultural or economic impact.

The BAT is divided vertically into 7 chapters that correspond with the risk assessment documents that normally accompany an application to regulators:

• A guide to terminology and statistics;
• genomic level hazard identification;
• transcriptome and proteome level hazard identification;
• health hazard identification;
• environment hazard identification
• omitted research.

In future versions, the BAT is to be expanded to include specialist legal and regulatory issues especially around monitoring and detection (for co-existence). The BAT is divided horizontally into 3 gates: risk overview (especially useful for first time users or developing an assessment of a type of GMO for the first time); assessment preparation; and final checklist. Each vertical category is supported by deep subject reviews that include the element of “forecasting”.

All chapters are complete and are now being incrementally prepared for the web interface under development. The BAT will be launched in February 2009.