CFDA#
12.910
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Funder Type
Federal Government
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IT Classification
B - Readily funds technology as part of an award
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Authority
U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Summary
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative research proposals of interest to the Biological Technologies Office (BTO). Proposed research should investigate leading edge approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, technologies, or systems at the intersection of biology with engineering and the physical and computer sciences. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of the art. BTO seeks unconventional approaches that are outside the mainstream, challenge assumptions, and have the potential to radically change established practice, lead to extraordinary outcomes, and create entirely new fields.
The mission of BTO is to foster, demonstrate, and transition breakthrough fundamental research, discoveries, and applications that integrate biology, engineering, computer science, mathematics, and the physical sciences. BTO's investment portfolio goes far beyond life sciences applications in medicine to include areas of research such as human-machine interfaces, microbes as production platforms, and deep exploration of the impact of evolving ecologies and environments on U.S. readiness and capabilities. BTO's programs operate across a wide range of scales, from individual cells to the warfighter to global ecosystems. BTO responds to the urgent and long-term needs of the Department of Defense (DoD) and addresses national security priorities.
History of Funding
None is available.
Additional Information
BTO is interested in submissions related to the following areas:
General Topic:
- Biological technology topic areas that fit the national security scope of BTO's mission.
Human Performance:
- Understanding and improving the treatment of and resilience in neurological health, transformative neural processing, fatigue, cognition, and optimized human performance, including in extreme conditions.
- Discovering interventions that utilize biotechnology, biochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and related disciplines to advance and optimize human performance, including in extreme conditions.
- Developing and leveraging technologies to advance continuous or near-continuous monitoring of an organism's physiology to elucidate mechanisms of human readiness and resilience.
- Understanding and improving interfaces between the biological and physical world to enable seamless hybrid systems and revolutionary new human-machine interfaces.
- Developing approaches to enhance physiological resilience and performance in extreme conditions (e.g., cold weather climates) or to reduce musculoskeletal injuries via interventions that do not require genomic modifications.
- Developing technologies for rapid assessment of psychophysiological status.
Materials, Sensors, Processing:
- Designing novel materials, sensors, or processes that mimic or are inspired by biological systems.
- Developing technologies to leverage biological systems and enhance the acquisition and maintenance of critical and strategic organic and inorganic materials.
- Developing sustainable and controllable technologies that integrate biological systems into the built environments.
- Creating tools to understand the underlying rules defining biomolecular and biomaterial structure/function properties in order to predict desired outcomes for novel materials.
- Understanding and leveraging complex biological systems into underlying functional rules and processes to provide models that govern interactions of biological systems from biofilms to organs or ecosystems.
- Developing new computational and experimental tools and capabilities for forward engineering of biological systems, such as cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and complex communities, to both develop new products and functional systems, as well as to gain new insights into underlying mechanisms.
- Developing new platform technologies that integrate, automate, and miniaturize the collection, processing, and analysis of biological and chemical samples.
- Developing hybrid biological/engineered systems that integrate biological organisms, components, biologically-encoded circuitry, biogenic materials, or exploit biological phenomena to surpass capabilities of abiotic equivalents.
Ecosystem and Environmental:
- Testing and validating new theories and computational models that identify factors and principles underlying collective and interactive behaviors of biological organisms at all scales, from individual cells to global ecosystems.
- Developing technologies that leverage synthetic biology, living cellular systems, ecological diversity, or properties of biology to support operations in extreme environments and experimental methodologies to evaluate potential benefits of such innovations.
- Understanding the dynamics of population and ecosystem behavior to preserve equilibrium, provide strategic opportunity, mitigate impacts, or avoid catastrophe.
- Developing and leveraging new technologies for ecosystem restoration and the stabilization of agricultural production and post-disaster recovery.
- Understanding emerging threats to global food and water supplies and developing countermeasures that could be implemented on regional or global scales.
- Developing and leveraging new insights into non-human biology across and between populations, e.g., microbes, insects, plants, marine life, and how they interact with their environment.
- Leveraging biology to provide new tactical and strategic operational advantages, concealment and camouflage approaches, and bio-inorganic capabilities.
- Developing approaches using biology, biogeochemistry or materials science to mitigate or sequester anthropogenic carbon dioxide in terrestrial, marine, and post disaster environments.
Biosecurity and Biosafety:
- Developing new technologies and approaches that ensure biosafety and biosecurity of biological hardware and data, as well as the safety and security of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that can accelerate the biological research and development process.
- Developing innovative technologies that characterize novel, engineered, and/or natural emerging pathogens to prevent their spread or understand their origin.
- Developing new technologies to treat, prevent, forecast, and detect the emergence and spread of infectious diseases that have the potential to cause significant health, economic, and social burden.
Biomedical and Biodefense:
- Understanding causal relationships that underlie acute and chronic disease states to support warfighter health.
- Developing new technologies for the rapid, automated, and resilient manufacturing, delivery, and distribution of critical molecules for applications in therapeutics, chemical and biological defense.
- Developing new technologies to support next-generation cellular therapeutic applications.
- Developing new platform technologies for targeted, effective, spatiotemporally controlled delivery of large and small molecules and biologics.
- Leveraging biotechnology to create new platform solutions that combat antimicrobial resistance, generate novel drug and cell-based therapeutics, and treat warfighter injury and illness.
- Developing novel diagnostic, prophylactic, and therapeutic approaches for warfighter injury that can be provided even in austere settings and extreme conditions.