DARPA Unveils Program to Speed Up Discovery of Molecules for Defense Applications

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a new program that seeks to develop artificial intelligence-based processes designed to accelerate the discovery of molecules for military applications.

The Accelerated Molecular Discovery program aims to “speed the time to design, validate, and optimize new molecules with defined properties from several years to a few months, or even several weeks,” Anne Fischer, program manager at DARPA’s defense sciences office, said in a statement published Thursday.

“We aim to develop the AI tools, models and experimental systems to enable autonomous design of molecules to quickly meet DoD needs,” Fischer added.

The AMD program will require researchers to build closed-loop platforms that work to facilitate autonomous extraction of chemical data from databases, carry out experimental measurements and adopt computational methods to create predictive tools.

DARPA will hold a proposers day webcast on Oct. 18 to discuss the program.