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. With its ability to perform complex chemistries, be flexibly programmed through DNA code, scale, adapt to changing environments and self-repair, biology represents one of the most powerful manufacturing platforms known. However, the DoD's ability to harness this platform is rudimentary. Living Foundries seeks to develop the 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 program will enable the rapid and scalable development of previously unattainable technologies and products (i.e. those that cannot be accessed using known, synthetic mechanisms) leveraging biology to solve challenges associated with production of new materials (e.g. flouropolymers, enzymes, lubricants, coatings and materials for harsh environments), novel functions (e.g. self-repairing and self-regenerating systems), biological reporting systems, and therapeutics to facilitate new solutions and enhancements to military needs and capabilities. 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 supply chains that are vulnerable to political change, targeted attack, or environmental accident. If successful, Living Foundries will do for biology what very-large-scale integration (VLSI) did for the semiconductor device industry: 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, develops and yields design rules and tools, and manages biological complexity through simplification, abstraction, and standardization of both processes and components. The result will be rapid design, construction, implementation and testing 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 the 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 and modeling; automated, modular and standardized fabrication and genome-scale engineering processes; 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 begins in FY 2013 in PE 0602715E, project MBT-02.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2014
- Source ID
- f9879baf054993ffeafa99b32f3fb061