IARPA announces Proposers’ Day for new FELIX program

On June 19, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity posted a presolicitation notice for its FELIX program. The FELIX Proposers’ Day will take place on July 27. Attendees must register no later than 5:00pm  EDT on July 20, 2017.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will host a Proposers’ Day Conference for the FELIX program on July 27, 2017 in anticipation of the release of a new solicitation. The Conference will be held from 9 AM to 3 PM EDT in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The purpose of the conference will be to provide information on the FELIX program and the research areas the program aims to address, to address questions from potential proposers and to provide a forum for potential proposers to present their capabilities for teaming opportunities.

New biotechnologies have enabled the development of a diversity of biological systems, with potential benefits ranging from new vaccines and therapeutics to novel materials and improved crops. Of particular note are genome editing tools that are commonly used worldwide to make biological engineering more accessible, more convenient, and less expensive. At the same time, these tools have the potential to be misused, accidentally or deliberately, to adversely affect health, the economy, and national security. The FELIX program aims to develop new capabilities that can detect engineered changes within biological systems to expedite appropriate mitigation responses to unlawful or accidental release of organisms.

The FELIX program aims to develop a suite of tools for the agnostic detection of engineered biological organisms, ranging from viruses, bacteria, insects, animals and plants that are either purposefully or accidentally developed and/or released with the potential to cause harm. Ideally, the tools will expand the quality and amount of information available to distinguish engineered organisms from natural organisms, i.e., natural variation from intentional engineering. These may include technologies such as novel methods and high throughput techniques in genomics, systems biology, bioinformatics and evolutionary biology. The tools should be able to improve the confidence in determining whether a system has been engineered. Examples include identifying signatures that were previously not accessible, using data from multiple interrogation points, increasing sensitivity, improving the quality of the data, and leveraging technologies that can increase throughput and reduce the complexity of sample analysis.

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps