Biological Technologies

DARPA - Biological Technologies Office HR001123S0045

BTO's mission is to develop capabilities that leverage the unique properties of biology - adaption, replication, resilience and complexity, to revolutionize how the United States defends the homeland and prepares and protects its Warfighters. Research in BTO creates biotechnological capabilities that provide tactical care and restore function to injured warfighters, increase operational resilience, develop novel functional materials, and detect and protect against threats to maintain force readiness.

Human Performance: Understanding and improving treatment of and resilience in neurological health, transformative neural processing, fatigue, cognition, and optimized human performance and teaming, including in extreme conditions. Discovering interventions that utilize biotechnology, biochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, social and behavioral science, and related disciplines to advance and optimize human performance and teaming, including in extreme conditions. Developing and leveraging technologies to advance continuous or near-continuous monitoring of physiology to elucidate mechanisms of human readiness and resilience. Understanding and improving interfaces between the biological and physical world to enable seamless biohybrid systems and devices. 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.

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 material development. 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 predictive capabilities for 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.

Ecosystem and Environmental: Testing and validating new theories, methods and computational models that identify and quantify factors and principles underlying collective and interactive behaviors of biological organisms at all scales, from individual cells, to complex 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.

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.

Multiple awards

Please contact the program director.

Proposal Abstract Due Date and Time: Abstracts may be submitted on a rolling basis until June 20, 2024, at 4:00 PM ET.

Proposals may be submitted on a rolling basis until June 20, 2024, at 4:00 PM ET.

E-Mail: BTOBAA2023@darpa.mil