The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has created a new division, the Biological Technologies Office (BTO), to investigate projects incorporating biology, engineering and computer science.
The new division expands on the work of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO) and Microsystems Technology Offices (MSO).
The initial BTO portfolio includes programs transferred from DSO and MTO, as well as the Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces program that builds on the work of DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics and Reliable Neural-Interface Technology programs.
“The Biological Technologies Office will advance and expand on a number of earlier DARPA programs that made preliminary inroads into the bio-technological frontier,” Geoff Ling, director of BTO, stated in a press release. “We’ve been developing the technological building blocks, we’ve been analyzing our results, and now we’re saying publicly to the research and development community that we are ready to start turning the resulting knowledge into practical tools and capabilities.”
