Industry Day: Convergence

The DARPA Biological Technologies Office (BTO) is hosting an Industry Day for the Convergence program, which seeks to establish an open-architecture pipeline for the design, development, and operation of deployable environmental biological sensors. These sensors are specifically focused on detecting priority Department of War (DoW) chemical threat agents and are intended to enable future rapid development and deployment of biological sensors against new threats. The program aims to integrate biology and engineering to create advanced environmental biosensors designed to safeguard defense personnel by remotely and distributively detecting environmental hazards, including chemical analytes and pharmaceutical agents, in operational and austere environments. The event will cover enabling standoff detection and identification of chemical threat agents using biosensors, designing and testing biosensors to meet defense lifecycle demands, and developing open-architecture, composable biosensor design approaches and an industrial pipeline. The program brings together synthetic biologists, environmental scientists, and engineering experts to transition biological sensors safely from controlled laboratory settings to the field, with development structured across four tiers from individual component design to full system integration and eventual regulatory approval.