The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking to build a scalable, integrated, rapid design and prototyping infrastructure for the facile engineering of biology under DARPA’s Living Foundries: 1000 Molecules program.
The goal of the program is to develop a first-of-its-kind biotechnology infrastructure defined by tools and processes that make possible a scale and sophistication of experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration that does not exist today.
This envisioned infrastructure would enable transformative and currently inaccessible projects to provide new materials, flexible capabilities, and manufacturing paradigms for national security and public health.
DARPA is soliciting proposals under this Living Foundries Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) that aim to create a fully integrated, rapid design and prototyping infrastructure that spans design tools, scalable, automated, and parallelized design fabrication, and high-throughput design evaluation and validation.
To support the infrastructure to be developed, a limited number of proposals for advanced studies that will develop component technologies, including design algorithms, scalable transformation and genetic integration methodologies, and flexible assay systems, may also be considered.
As a demonstration of the functionality and flexibility of the infrastructure being developed, the program aims to generate 1000 unique molecules and chemical building blocks of relevance to DoD by the end of the period of performance
Living Foundries: 1000 Molecules is complementary to and builds upon the Living Foundries: ATCG program, which is developing new tools and technologies to accelerate the biological design-build-test cycle. Together, these programs will leverage biology as a technology platform to pursue transformative applications across chemicals, materials, sensing capabilities, and therapeutics.
The 1000 Molecules Proposer’s Day Workshop will be held July 24, 2013 in Arlington, Va. A follow-on webinar will be held July 31, 2013 to provide additional details regarding the BAA process and to reiterate the proposal preparation and submission instructions and requirements. Advanced registration is required.
The government anticipates making multiple awards under the effort. The estimated start date for initial task areas is mid-March 2014.
Topic areas and response requirements are available under Solicitation Number: DARPA-BAA-13-37. The BAA deadline is September 17, 2013.
