The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity established a new program aimed at discovering innovations to improve the U.S. intelligence community’s biointelligence and biosecurity capabilities.
The research program has awarded contracts to nine teams, and will be divided into two phases with performance periods of nine months and 15 months, respectively, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Wednesday.
The Biointelligence and Biosecurity for the Intelligence Community program is interested in technologies that can detect or characterize biological targets of interest. It will also fund projects that use cellular memory to improve biosecurity, as well as technologies that fortify the data infrastructure of biological samples, biotechnologies and synthetic biology.
IARPA has chosen the first set of teams to participate in the program. The contract awardees are comprised of nonprofit groups, companies and academic institutions. They are led by the following organizations:
- Battelle Memorial Institute
- Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
- Exodigm Biosciences
- Georgia Tech Research Institute
- Ginkgo Bioworks
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- MRIGlobalQ
- Quantitative BioSciences
- Raytheon BBN
