Army Awards $50 Million to Bioscience Universities
September 15, 2003

The Army Research Office (ARO) is awarding an initial grant of up to $50 million over five years to a partnership among researchers at three universities to establish the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB). The partnership includes the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Six industrial partners are also participating by developing the technologies being created in the university laboratories.

“The ICB brings together world-class research institutions with the Army and future industry partnerships to leverage the rapid progress and large investments in Biotechnology,” said Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Research and Technology, Dr. Thomas H. Killion.

The ICB will provide the Army with skills and expertise in the areas of biologically-derived and biologically-inspired materials, sensors and information processing.

Jim Chang, ARO director, said, "We are enabling a focus for biotechnology research which is advantageous to the Army and which also leverages, on the Army's behalf, investments in biotechnology research by government research funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health."

"Biotechnology is a rapidly advancing area with the potential for a wide spectrum of applications that can significantly enhance the Army's Transformation to the Future Force," said Acting Director U.S. Army Research Laboratory, John Miller.

“Through this innovative research collaboration, new materials will be created with novel properties and functionalities that will advance sensors, electronics and information processing technologies to enable transformational capabilities that are not feasible today for the soldier,” said Killion.

The ICB will conduct unclassified scientific research in sensors, electronics, information processing, and the technical fundamentals enabling the transition of cutting edge biotechnology research into these application areas.

A single university will serve as lead UARC host for the ICB, with subcontracts to two other universities that complement the expertise of the host institution and are fully integrated and networked into the host institution program.

The lead university, UCSB, will host those programs and equipment necessary for providing dynamic and real time collaboration with its partner universities, Cal Tech and MIT, as well as participating team members from industry, Army Labs, and other research centers. The ICB partners with industry and Department of Defense research organizations to accelerate the transition of its research into products with military and commercial applications.

"The Army Research Laboratory looks forward to working with the ICB consortium during development of biotechnology discoveries that provide the Army the capabilities required to accomplish its missions,” said Miller.

UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang said, "We are delighted to be part of such a strong team with our partners at Caltech and MIT and in industry. At Santa Barbara we have been excited for some time about the emerging potential for research discoveries at the interface between biological sciences and physical and engineering sciences. This project will give scientists and engineers at the three institutions and their industrial collaborators an extraordinary opportunity to conduct research at that interface and at the forefront of new biotechnology."

Daniel Morse, chair of the UCSB Biomolecular Science and Engineering Program and a professor of molecular genetics and biochemistry, will serve as director of the new institute. Frank Doyle, a UCSB chemical engineering professor who holds the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Process Control, will serve as ICB associate director. The MIT team is headed by Angela Belcher, the John Chipman Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering. At Caltech the effort is led by David Tirrell, the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor and chair of the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division.

To date the industrial partners are Aerospace Corp., Applied Biosystems, Becton-Dickinson, Genencor International, IBM, and SAIC.

Robert Campbell, the ARO program officer for the ICB grant, said, "The inspiration for the ICB comes from the fact that 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. The promise here is for providing unique enabling technology for more advanced integrated circuits for high-performance sensing, computing and information processing.

"The idea is to understand biological mechanisms and to harness them for design and fabrication of new materials, devices and systems performance to equip the Army of the 21st century. But the benefit to the United States is more than military. The for-profit industrial partners have the opportunity and the incentive to translate to the civilian marketplace the fruits of the research findings. A thriving US economy is essential to the country's defense as is a well-equipped Army," said Campbell.

Morse points out that the synthesis of materials in biology necessarily occurs under conditions amenable to life in contrast to many present manufacturing processes, which entail extraordinary conditions of temperature or deleterious chemicals or a sterile environment.

Morse is well known for discoveries that helped inaugurate the emerging field of nano-biomolecular and biomimetic materials synthesis.

"Our team includes the world's leaders in the discoveries of these underlying molecular mechanisms in nano-bio-fabrication," said Morse. "Our aim is to integrate work at the three campuses in a seamless way so that we can increase the rate of productivity of discoveries and transition prototype development with our industrial partners.

"The teams at UCSB, MIT, and Caltech are recognized for developing a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to this kind of research, uniting researchers from multiple departments and programs into a single working unit without disciplinary borders," Morse said. "At UCSB both the dean of engineering, Matthew Tirrell, and the dean of science, Martin Moskovits, have been integral and essential to the process of envisioning the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies."

The research plan for the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies will be organized around three emphases:

(1) Sensors, Electronics and Information Processing, led by UCSB Chemistry and Materials Professor Guillermo Bazan. Research will focus on the development of sensors using biological molecules and paradigms for sensing with unprecedented sensitivity, accuracy, and speed and the translation of information from sensors into electronic information for real-time sensing and response capabilities.

(2) Biotechnological and Biologically Inspired Routes to Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, led by Morse. Research will investigate the use of biological mechanisms and biomolecular mechanisms to control nanofabrication of new materials for electronic, optical, and optoelectronic activity, including new approaches to the generation of electrical energy and portable sources of energy such as would be carried for defense applications.

(3) Biotechnological and Biologically Inspired New Routes to Information Professing, led by UCSB Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor David Awschalom and Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Evelyn Hu. Research seeks to use biological systems to guide the development of new routes for information processing. Molecular signaling and recognition and integration of information will be considered from both the perspective of the small world of molecules but also from the macroscopic perspective of ecosystems. Awschalom heads the UCSB Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computing. Hu is UCSB's science director for the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), whose state-of the-art research facilities, nearing the construction phase, will greatly enhance the ability of ICB researchers at UCSB to advance their cross-disciplinary research agendas.

Three complementary emphases focus on technical foundations related to the research plan. The first two pertain to "tools for discovery", the technical investigations and advances that enable research in the topical areas above:

(1) Discovery, Synthesis and Delivery, led by UCSB Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering Patrick Daugherty, will provide a discovery pipeline for the development of innovative sensor concepts, integration and self-assembly methods, signal generation and processing.

(2) Materials and Device Characterization Over Multiple Length and Time Scales, led by UCSB Chemical Engineering Professor Brad Chmelka, will advance the existing state-of-the-art in several molecular techniques and macroscopic imaging and characterization strategies needed to evaluate and advance the performance of new molecular biomagnetic/bioelectronic materials and devices.

(3) Complex Multi-Scale Dynamic and Predictive Modeling, led by Doyle, will address the analysis and mathematical modeling of multiple-scale (gene-cell-system) complex biological phenomena and materials behavior using principles of systems biology.

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