The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has recently awarded funding to Harvard University for research in support of the Living Foundries: 1000 Molecules program.
The goal of the program is to develop a first-of-its-kind biotechnology infrastructure to provide new materials, flexible capabilities, and manufacturing paradigms for national security and public health.
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 the Department of Defense by the end of the program’s period of performance.
Living Foundries: 1000 Molecules is complementary to and builds upon the Living Foundries: Advanced Tools and Capabilities for Generalizable Platforms (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 Harvard award was valued at $512,930 (HR0011-14-C-0072).