Biotech Updates

U.S. Department of Defense Explores Biotech

April 10, 2014

The U.S. Department of Defense is exploring on the intersection of biology and physical sciences to improve national defense. Thus, they have opened the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) as a new division of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for new technologies for use by the military.

According to the official statement of DARPA, BTO aims to harness the power of biological systems by applying the rigorous tools of engineering and related disciplines, and to design next-generation technologies that are inspired by insights gained from the life sciences. BTO's programs will operate across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales—from individual cells to humans and other organisms and the communities in which they operate, and from the time it takes for a nerve to fire to the time it may take a new virus to spread around the world one sneeze at a time.

Read the official statement at http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2014/04/01.aspx.