Army Grants $50 Million for Biotech Research

The Army Research Office (ARO) has awarded a $50 million contract to a three-university consortium to create the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB), a research organization that will focus on creating sensors, electronics, optics, and information-processing systems based on what the army describes as “biologically derived and biologically inspired materials.” The new institute, to be headed by the University of California, Santa Barbara, is intended to “improve dramatically the effectiveness of the army by creating a single conduit for developing, assessing, and adapting new products and new biotechnologies in direct support of the army’s mission,” said Jim Chang, ARO’s director.

In addition to UCSB, the institute will include MIT and Caltech, as well as several industrial partners who will help the university laboratories with new technology development. Daniel Morse, chair of UCSB’s bio-molecular science and engineering program, will direct the ICB.

“Biology uses precise mechanisms to produce exquisitely structured materials, and that coordination of biological function at the molecular, cellular, and systems level takes place by remarkably effective communication and information transfer,” said Robert Campbell, the army’s program officer for the grant. “The idea is to understand biological mechanisms and to harness them for design and fabrication of new materials, devices, and systems.”

An example of what the ICB will be trying to develop is recent work by Morse. He has shown that fiberglass silica needles of a certain marine sponge are made via a protein, which acts as both an enzyme-catalyst and a template for growth. That discovery has been adapted to make photovoltaic and nonbiological semiconducting materials.

The new ICB research group will include “the world’s leaders in discoveries of these underlying molecular mechanisms in nanobiofabrication,” said Morse. “Our aim is to integrate work at the three campuses in a seamless way.”

In addition to Morse, the ICB leadership will include Frank Doyle, a UCSB chemical engineer; MIT’s Angela Belcher, a professor of materials and biological engineering; and David Tirrell, chair of chemistry and chemical engineering division at Caltech.