Living Foundries*
Abstract
*Formerly part of Synthetic Biology 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 - a challenge that costs the DoD nearly $23 billion per year and has no near term solution in sight. Living Foundries offers the potential to program and engineer biology, and enable the capability to design and engineer systems that 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. Living Foundries aims to do for biology what very-large-scale integration (VLSI) did for the semiconductor device industry - i.e. enable the design and engineering of increasingly complex systems to address and enhance military needs and capabilities. Living Foundries will develop and apply an engineering framework to biology that decouples biological design from fabrication, yields design rules and tools, and manages biological complexity through simplification, abstraction and standardization. The result will be to enable the design and implementation of complex, higher-order genetic networks with programmable functionality and DoD applicability. Research thrusts include developing the fundamental tools, capabilities and methodologies to accelerate the biological design-build-test cycle, thereby reducing extensive cost and time it takes to engineer new systems and expanding the complexity and accuracy of designs that can be built. Specific tools and capabilities include: interoperable tools for design, modeling, and automated fabrication; modular regulatory elements devices and circuits for hierarchical and scalable engineering; standardized test platforms and chassis; and novel approaches to process measurement, validation and debugging. Applied research for this program continues in FY 2013 in PE 0602715E, project MBT-02.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2013
- Source ID
- d9c2f93df6e0fb795d06004254f1b64a