DARPA redesign

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) opened a new office in April uniting its biology, and related engineering and computer science research. The Biological Technologies Office (BTO), directed by neurologist and retired Army colonel Geoffrey Ling, inherited 23 existing research programs and on April 24 launched its first new one, involving prosthetics. Other areas of research include diagnostics for infectious diseases, synthetic biology, biological clocks, systems biology and a program to establish the lineage of genetic modifications to living organisms. The office’s 2015 budget is around $250 million. The research programs and grant procedures will not change in their structure, wrote an agency spokesperson, though they will align with the office focus areas. Bringing the biology strands together under one of DARPA’s seven offices should give the agency’s leadership, “a better sense of how to make investments,” says David Rejeski, director of the science and technology program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, and a member of a DARPA external board of advisers. That, in turn, should enable the BTO to recruit competitive researchers working in its focus areas and help them win funding. “When you have an office dedicated to an area, [its director] is an advocate,” in the scramble for the agency’s $2.9 billion annual budget says Sharon Weinberger, a journalist and author of a forthcoming book on DARPA. Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University and previous DARPA grant winner says, “The neuro-social sciences and the mind-body axis are two areas where I suspect BTO will go.” BTO is soliciting its first round of applications on a rolling basis through April 30, 2015.

First published in Nature Biotechnology: [html] [pdf].

Note: This text corrected from the print version; a duplicate phrase was deleted here.