Program Summary
The Engineered Living Materials (ELM) program seeks to revolutionize military logistics and construction in remote, austere, high-risk, and/or post-disaster environments by developing living biomaterials that combine the structural properties of traditional building materials with attributes of living systems, including the ability to rapidly grow in situ, self-repair, and adapt to the environment. Living materials could solve existing challenges associated with the construction and maintenance of built environments, and introduce new capabilities to craft smart infrastructure that dynamically responds to its surroundings. Advances under the ELM program could also improve methods for manufacture and maintenance of military systems such as tanks, planes, and ships.
ELM specifically aims to develop design tools and methods that enable the engineering of structural features into cellular systems that function as living materials, thereby opening up a new design space for building technology. The program aims to validate these new methods through the production of living materials that can reproduce, self-organize, and self-heal. Such engineered living materials would also have the ability to respond to their environment in designed ways, self-repairing in response to physical or other stresses, or detecting the presence of specific stimuli such as hazardous compounds.
The program has two technical tracks that balance near-term opportunities with long-term capabilities. The first track seeks to deliver hybrid materials composed of inert structural scaffolds that support the growth of living cells. These platform technologies are intended to be scalable and generalizable to support near-term transition out of the laboratory. The second track aims to discover fundamental engineering principles that enable the genetic programming of structural features into biological systems. Performer teams seek to invent methods to program the development of multicellular systems with specified and tunable patterns and shapes.