Living Foundries
Abstract
The goal of Living Foundries is to create a revolutionary, biologically-based manufacturing platform to provide new materials, capabilities and manufacturing paradigms for the DoD and the Nation. The program seeks to develop the new tools, technologies and methodologies to transform biology into an engineering practice, speeding the biological design-build-test cycle and expanding the complexity of systems that can be engineered. The goal is to enable the rapid development of previously unattainable technologies and products, leveraging biology to solve challenges associated with production of new materials, novel capabilities, fuels and medicines and providing novel solutions and enhancements to military needs and capabilities. For example, one motivating, widespread and currently intractable problem is that of corrosion/materials degradation challenge that costs the DoD nearly $23 billion per year and has no near term solution in sight. Living Foundries, with its ability to truly program and engineer biology, will enable the capability to design and engineer systems to rapidly and dynamically prevent, seek out, identify and repair corrosion/materials degradation. Ultimately, Living Foundries aims to provide game-changing manufacturing paradigms for the DoD, enabling distributed, adaptable, on-demand production of critical and high-value materials, devices and capabilities in the field or on base. Such a capability will decrease the DoD's dependence on tenuous material and energy supply chains that could be cut due to political change, targeted attack or environmental accident. Research thrusts will focus on the development and demonstration of open technology platforms, or bio-foundries, that integrate the tools and capabilities developed in PE 0601101E/TRS-01 to prove out capabilities for rapid (months vs. service-oriented architecture years) design and construction of new biological production systems. The ultimate vision is to develop point-of-use, on-demand, distributed and customized production of strategic materials and systems that exploit the capabilities and programmability (through DNA) of biology. Activities in this area will accelerate the development of DoD-focused applications and shift the field from simple, isolated genetic circuits to whole genome engineering. Such a platform spans from the ability to design, optimize and simulate (in silico) a synthetic genetic regulatory network to the automated fabrication and validation of the synthetic design in a biological system. Demonstration platforms will be challenged to build a variety of military-relevant and complex functionalities, such as the ability to withstand harsh environments, to synthesize complex mixtures of chemicals, or to rapidly and dynamically prevent, seek out, identify and repair corrosion/materials degradation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2013
- Source ID
- 5e959e74a77b02679d4a2f0f44babb44