DARPA programs look to change the face of casualty care in the age of the drones

Welcome back to Defense News Weekly. I'm Courtney Alban, the space and emerging technology reporter for Defense News

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, commonly known as DARPA, is known for tackling some of the hardest defense technology problems

The agency is behind many of the cutting-edge systems in development for the U.S. military, but they also have a broad suite of research programs that many people don't know about

Today, we're joined by the head of the Biological Technologies Office, Dr. Michael Kores

to walk us through BTO's current portfolio of projects. Mike, welcome to the studio

Thanks for having me, Courtney. So maybe to start, could you give us an overview of kind of what your office does

and why it's important to national security and what DOD is doing now

Certainly. So BTO, the Biological Technologies Office, is the newest office at DARPA

It's 11 years old, so not a newfoundling, but it is a new office

And DARPA is always changing. So many of the offices that initially existed have changed their mission or scope

or new offices now exist and old offices don't exist anymore. So it's an ever-changing place, which is exciting because that's the mission, right

The mission is to stay relevant on the scientific side, on the technological side

And we all know technology advances very, very rapidly. So with the advent of a lot of biological technologies being more mature

being more capable of affecting both humans, crops, livestock, whatever have you

the Biological Technologies Office was stood up in 2014. And we're now focusing on the warfighter, so that's the human system

that is the most important asset to the DoD, certainly. And we're also looking holistically at biological systems

be it livestock or be it crops, for example. So that's all part of our mission space. Okay, great

Can you give us a sense of kind of what your office resourcing looks like for 2026 and kind of what some of your top priorities are from that perspective So I can talk broadly about what DARPA resourcing is like and there six technology offices so the interested viewers fare to make their inferences with regards to that

DARPA is about $4.3 billion, give or take, in fiscal 25. We'll see how that goes in fiscal 26

The six tech offices take their share, depending on what their actual mission sets are

depending on how large the systems are that they work on. The priorities for us on the biological technology side are threefold

we really have to understand how we accelerate the development of data generating abilities for training of foundational models or AI systems

We all are very interested in understanding what is the art of the possible with regards to training AIs

and essentially accelerating the training of AIs on the physical world. So not the text models that you and I may be using as ChatGPT or Claude or whatever have you

but really a system that we prompt saying, like, what does reality look like

And the system needs to tell you what reality looks like and actually be correct

That's actually quite hard to do for these systems. That's one. The second thing that is also critically important is the live chain

We may speak about that later a little bit. It's combat casualty care. As we mentioned, the warfighter is a big part of our mission set

The warfighter is under constant threat, certainly from enemy activity, but also unmanned systems, drones even more so

We've looked at various different conflicts, including the Ukraine and Russia conflict, where drones are the prevalent form of warfare and injury

That changes how we need to think about combat casualty care, and we own that responsibility

And thirdly, we're also looking around into what can be done to actually know more of what biological threats or just activities are that are going on around the globe

We actually don't have a good way of understanding what the latest and greatest strains of various different viruses are that are floating around the globe

We know it happens. We don't know with great detail what happens

We don have that type of resolution that you would get for example from a satellite looking at a landmass for example So we lacking that type of capability So that really what we excited about Okay All right Well I excited to dig more into some of that later in our conversation

You know, you mentioned that your office has been around since 2014. It does seem like

recently there's been kind of a growing recognition of the importance of biotechnology and

an emphasis on kind of the need for, you know, early research to support that

a few years ago, we saw DOD publish its first biomanufacturing strategy, which is a little

different than what you're talking about. But that kind of pushed for more investment in this area

At DARPA, how have you seen interest and urgency grow in recent years for BTO

I think biomanufacturing as a subtopic is also still included in our thought space

because broadly speaking, biology does certain things well and other things not. So the question

becomes where is biology privileged to create or prevent surprise, which is DARPA's core mission

strategic surprise. And I think what we can say is that biology actually, it packs quite well. So

it usually comes in very small form factors because it can grow. It can grow, it can replicate itself

So you have actually abilities to, for example, think about manufacturing in space, right? So

shooting stuff into orbit is expensive. So you want to have the minimum amount of mass that you

move into orbit. That's a huge area of interest for us. Secondly, however, also on the biological

side, we recognize that the interest in biology has increased. And we do want to do our part to

put that signal out in the world to say like, okay, let's really figure out how we can use biology

But not just, and my former academic self will recognize that, we don't always make a product

in academia or even in startup land that is actually robust enough to be used by a DoD customer

So there's a gap that we have to recognize and we got to do better at, which is to say

I will make a system or a product and it will work reliably every time

That really critical And that a different hurdle that I think many of us recognize and are getting after I don know if this fits a little bit into that discussion but I also a little bit curious about kind of the state of the biotech industrial base in the U

You know, and can you speak a little bit to kind of where the strengths are, where maybe there's some gaps, but also then like how that industrial base could help maybe with the problem you just described of pushing some of these projects or this technology further, the readiness piece

I think most people will agree that the biotech industrial base in the United States is primarily focused on therapeutics and diagnostics, so very heavily aligned on the clinical side, as it should be

There's been enormous advances that the United States and other countries have been able to achieve over the last couple decades with regards to treatment of many different kinds of diseases, as well as better and better diagnostics, certainly

So we've made all the advances, all the Nobel Prizes for these types of advances

Having said that, you're now thinking about, again, using technologies that were developed for clinical use and clinical price points

Okay, and we're now translating them to an industrial use and industrial price point. So there is still a translational gap that has been harder to get over than not from the industrial base

So I did a couple of startups myself, so I'm familiar with that part of the space

and there is a growing body of startups that is excited about using biology and biological chemistry

for these types of industrial approaches. Still hard, still growing, so it's not in scope and size similar to, let's say, for example

the traditional defense industrial base. And I would love for a closer connection of that entirety, also the medical industrial base, with us

because most of the work that we do will need to be transitioned to some commercial entity at some point in time

in order for it to be successful. Okay, great. Well, it looks like it's time for us to take a break

When we come back, we'll discuss a DARPA biotech project that's focused on agricultural security