The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is seeking to develop methodologies to rapidly characterize the virulence of existing and emerging biothreats to inform risk assessments, disease preparedness and response activities.

Traditional pathogen characterization methods (i.e. animal studies, cell culture, bacterial culture, etc.) can be time consuming and expensive, and when used to examine all existing threat agents will become overly burdensome and intractable.

DHS’ Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Chemical and Biological Defense Division (CBD) seeks to develop novel methodologies that can be broadly applied to explore the biodiversity of pathogens to elucidate the genotypic, phenotypic and functional determinants that make a pathogen a biothreat agent.

The ultimate goal is to better understand and model the mechanisms by which a threat agent acts in order to predict future disease hazards.

Further requirements are detailed on FedBizOpps under Solicitation Number: HSHQDC14RB0009OBAA14003CALL22. The response deadline is Jun 19, 2017 3:00 pm Eastern.