On September 30, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, announced the start of a multi-year research effort to produce new methods for detecting low-dose ionizing radiation exposure.
Through the Targeted Evaluation of Ionizing Radiation Exposure (TEI-REX) program, IARPA is pursuing new technologies to identify low-dose radiation exposure, determine the exposure timeline, and pinpoint environmental factors related to the place of exposure. The research goals are to better protect the health and safety of Intelligence Community, military, and government personnel overseas while also supporting nuclear counterproliferation efforts. IARPA aims to build a fundamentally new understanding of low-dose radiation’s physical impacts on humans and organisms through advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, biomarker discovery, and analytical biology.
“Today’s technology mostly assesses exposure to high doses of radioactive materials by looking at multiple samples that often have limited accuracy for only a few days,” said program manager Dr. Michael Patterson. “TEI-REX looks to advance our knowledge of radiation exposure by engineering new methods to analyze small traces of exposure from samples that are much easier to collect, store, ship, and analyze for months.”
Through a competitive Broad Agency Announcement, IARPA awarded TEI-REX research contracts that address the full range of research objectives to the following teams:
- University of Washington
- The Ohio State University
- Signature Science, LLC
- Areté Associates
Test and evaluation work for the program will be performed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute.
Source: ODNI
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