DARPA’s Pandemic-Related Programs
June 30, 2020
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has contributed to the development of
important military and commercial technologies, including stealth and personal electronics. DARPA’s
role and investments in defense-related research and development (R&D), including biological defense,
has potential significance for the science and technology available to address the Coronavirus Disease
2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and any future biological threats. Advances in genome sequencing and
editing, along with the application of engineering principles and computing and information sciences to
the field of biology, have created opportunities to accelerate and expand the development of
biotechnology products and processes. Although DARPA has invested in biological research since its
establishment in 1958, in 2014 the agency created the Biological Technologies Office, which focuses
specifically on the biological sciences and biotechnology.
The Biological Technologies Office currently supports a number of programs that address pandemics.
Since the emergence of COVID-19, DARPA has shifted the efforts of many of these programs to focus
specifically on the coronavirus pandemic. According to DARPA,
There is currently a mismatch between the rapidity at which biological threats can emerge and
proliferate and the response time for developing and deploying effective medical
countermeasures.… Cognizant of the need for speed, DARPA began aggressively pursuing medical
countermeasures research more than a decade ago with a focus on developing generalizable, virus-
agnostic technologies that can address whatever threat emerges, rather than building a collection of
one-off solutions.
Examples of current DARPA investments include the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, whose
goal is to develop methods “capable of producing relevant numbers of doses against any known or
previously unknown infectious threat within 60 days of identification of such a threat.” Awardees of the
P3 program have been applying the results of their work to COVID-19. For example, a COVID-19
antibody treatment developed with support from DARPA by AbCellera Biologics, in partnership with Eli
Lilly and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Vaccine Research Center, began human clinical trials in
June 2020.
Additionally, an awardee from DARPA’s Epigenetic Characterization and Observation (ECHO) program,
Fluidigm, in collaboration with a consortium of medical schools, is developing an early detection test for
SARS-CoV-2, the novel virus that causes COVID-19.
