Defense Agency Funding for Biomedical Research

Updated 4.2025

Congressionally-Designated Medical Research Program (CDMRP)

https://cdmrp.health.mil/

*UPDATE: The “Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act of 2025” includes $650M in funding for the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.

Congress provided further direction for CDMRP program-level funding to the Secretary of Defense in Project Level Adjustment Tables to Accompany Division A, Title IV, Department of Defense, H.R. 1968, Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act.  Please note that these programs represent a only portion of programs funded in prior FYs.*

FY25 funded programs include:

The CDMRP originated in 1992 via Congressional appropriation to foster novel approaches to biomedical research in response to the expressed needs of its stakeholders, which it identifies as the American public, the military, and Congress.


CDMRP hallmarks include:

  • investing in groundbreaking research
  • targeting critical gaps
  • reviewing application using a two-tier formal review with no standing peer review panels and no “pay line”
  • involving consumer advocates throughout the program cycle
  • supporting both the next generation of researchers and established scientists.
  • funding the full pipeline of research development, including basic, translational, and clinical research.
  • fostering (or employing) collaboration and synergy

The CDMRP fills research gaps by funding high impact, high risk, and high gain projects that other agencies may not venture to fund. While individual programs are unique in their focus, all programs managed by the CDMRP share the common goal of advancing paradigm-shifting research, solutions that will lead to cures or improvements in patient care, or breakthrough technologies and resources for clinical benefit. The CDMRP strives to transform health care for Service Members and the American public through innovative and impactful research.

CDMRP Resources

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

DARPA’s mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security through transformational change instead of incremental advances. It works within an innovation ecosystem that includes academic, corporate, and governmental partners, with a constant focus on the Nation’s military Services, which work with DARPA to create new strategic opportunities and novel tactical options.

DARPA personnel rely on the Heilmeier Catechism to assess and think through every proposed research program. Created by former DARPA director George H. Heilmeier, the catechism is a set of eight questions that researchers and engineers answer to fully understand the context, costs, and effort required to execute a given project.  The Heilmeier Catechism should be used to examine and reframe your research projects for a DARPA audience.

The Heilmeier Catechism

  1. What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
  2. How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
  3. What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
  4. Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?
  5. What are the risks?
  6. How much will it cost?
  7. How long will it take?
  8. What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?

Resources

Biological Technology Office (BTO)

https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/bto

  • The Biological Technologies Office leverages biological properties and processes to revolutionize our ability to protect the nation’s warfighters. BTO harnesses advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to create new opportunities for transformative science across the biological spectrum.
  • Warfighter health and well-being are critical to mission success. BTO develops diagnostic and assessment systems to identify chemical and biological threats, medical countermeasures, and novel approaches to tactical care and warfighter performance and recovery on and off the battlefield.
  • BTO also leverages biological processes, technologies, and manufacturing opportunities to create resilient infrastructures and supply chains, protective solutions, and innovative sensors to ensure mission success in any location.  

BTO Thrust areas

  • Data Factories: developing foundational technologies to simulate and predict biological systems and outcomes (simulation, foundation models, data generation):
    • Generating Data: Vastly improving the quality and quantity of biological data while reducing costs; increasing speed and automation of cloud labs.
    • Understanding Data: Exploring the state of the art and enlisting stakeholders to construct necessary research portfolio.
    • Simulating Data:Enabling sequence to function and function to sequence that underpins whole cell modeling and cell-cell interactions.
  • Combat Casualty Care: Exploring solutions for warfighter readiness, health, and recovery, including medical countermeasures, diagnostics, health IT, and medical devices
  • Optimization:Ensuring peak warfighter performance, both physical and cognitive, throughout all phases of a mission.
  • Prevention:Protecting warfighters from any threat and advancing capabilities on the battlefield for immediate injury treatment.
  • Restoration: Creating biotechnological approaches to provide tactical care and restore function to injured warfighters.
  • Logistics: developing solutions to support mission success, including, for example, fibers for garments and distributed forward manufacturing:
    • Doing: Creating solutions that increase operational resilience and logistic security.
    • Making:Utilizing the advantages of biology to enable point-of-need production or strengthen existing supply chain for critical commodities.
    • Strengthening: Providing technologies that harden operations against disruption and expand capabilities in the field.

BTO generally issues a rolling office-wide BAA that is typically renewed annually with along with a number of BAAs on specific topics of interest. Topics from the BTO Office-Wide BAA closing September 10, 2025 https://grants.gov/search-results-detail/356403 include:

  • General Topics:
    • Biological technology topic areas that fit the national security scope of BTO’s mission.
    • Research into market opportunities, constraints, and communities affecting financing and commercialization of bioindustrial and biomedical technologies.
  • Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI):
    • Developing and advancing our understanding of the impact and principles underlying biological data generation, assessment and incorporation into the biological foundation models, or mixed-mode foundation models. This includes taking information theoretic approaches as well as understanding the scaling laws of these data for various types of models.
    • Advancing the capabilities of broad or narrow biological or mixed-mode foundation models far beyond the state of the art.
    • Developing and proving non-experimental models or hybrid experimental/nonexperimental assessment strategies for biological foundation model assessment.
    • Exponentially accelerating the time scale of biological system simulation from the subcellular through multicellular, organismal and environmental systems.
    • Developing ML and AI-enabled technologies to improve the accuracy, precision, and efficiency of warfighter decision-making in complex and dynamic environments (e.g., on and off the battlefield).
    • The development of virtual testbeds, digital twins, and/or synthetic data to accelerate or improve the predictive modeling of human performance.
  • Human Performance:
    • Understanding and improving treatment of and resilience in neurological health, transformative neural processing, fatigue, cognition, and optimized human performance and teaming, including in extreme conditions.
    • Discovering interventions that utilize biotechnology, biochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, social and behavioral science, and related disciplines to assess and optimize human performance and teaming (e.g., trust).
    • Developing and leveraging technologies to advance continuous or near-continuous monitoring of physiology to elucidate mechanisms of human readiness, cognitive status, and resilience.
    • Understanding and improving interfaces between the biological and physical world to enable seamless biohybrid systems and devices.
    • Developing approaches to enhance physiological resilience and performance in extreme conditions (e.g., cold weather climates) or to reduce musculoskeletal injuries via interventions that do not require genomic modifications.
    • Developing technologies for rapid assessment of psychophysiological status.
  • Materials, Sensors, Processing
    • Designing novel materials, sensors, or processes that mimic or are inspired by biological systems.
    • Creating tools such as foundation models or prediction engines to understand the underlying rules defining biomolecular and biomaterial or hybrid biotic/abiotic material structure/function properties (individual properties or groups of properties) in order to predict desired outcomes for novel material development. Importantly, these predictions should hold from the molecular scale to the macro scale.
    • Developing new computational and experimental tools and predictive capabilities for engineering of biological systems, such as cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and complex communities, to both develop new products and functional systems, as well as to gain new insights into underlying mechanisms.
    • Developing technologies to leverage biological systems and enhance the acquisition and maintenance of critical and strategic organic and inorganic materials.
    • Developing sustainable and controllable technologies that integrate biological systems into the built environments.
    • Understanding and leveraging complex biological systems into underlying functional rules and processes to provide models that govern interactions of biological systems from biofilms to organs or ecosystems.
    • Developing new platform technologies that integrate, automate, and miniaturize the collection, processing, and analysis via direct or indirect interrogation of biological and chemical samples.
    • Developing hybrid biological/engineered systems that integrate biological organisms, components, biologically-encoded circuitry, biogenic materials, or exploit biological phenomena to surpass capabilities of abiotic equivalents.
    • Developing novel technologies to remotely sense, process, or analyze weak biological signals occurring in the natural background environment.
    • Developing novel biological sensor platforms with reduced size, weight, and power requirements of equivalent, electro-optical or electro-mechanical systems with orders of magnitude increase in equivalent performance.
  • Ecosystem and Environmental
    • Understanding emerging threats to global food and water supplies and developing countermeasures that could be implemented on regional or global scales.
    • Developing and leveraging new insights into non-human biology across and between populations, e.g., microbes, insects, plants, marine life, and how they interact with their environment.
    • Leveraging biology to provide new tactical and strategic operational advantages, concealment and camouflage approaches, and bio-inorganic capabilities.
    • Developing approaches using biology, biogeochemistry or materials science to mitigate or sequester anthropogenic carbon dioxide, chemicals, and contaminants in terrestrial, marine, and post-disaster environments.
    • Testing and validating new theories, methods and computational models that identify and quantify factors and principles underlying collective and interactive behaviors of biological organisms at all scales, from individual cells to complex ecosystems.
    • Developing technologies that leverage synthetic biology, living cellular systems, ecological diversity, or properties of biology to support operations in extreme environments and experimental methodologies to evaluate potential benefits of such innovations.
    • Creating in silico or organically-based models, model systems, and/or tools that exceed the naturally evolved pace of biological processes from chemistry, molecular genetics and metabolomics, to microbial evolution and community building, to human systems.
    • Understanding the dynamics of population and ecosystem behavior to preserve equilibrium, provide strategic opportunity, mitigate impacts, or avoid catastrophe.
    • Developing and leveraging new technologies for ecosystem restoration and the stabilization of agricultural production and post-disaster recovery.
  • Biosecurity and Biosafety
    • Developing new technologies and approaches that ensure biosafety and biosecurity of biological hardware and data, as well as the safety and security of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that can accelerate the biological research and development process.
    • Developing innovative technologies that characterize novel, engineered, and/or natural emerging pathogens to prevent their spread or understand their origin.
    • Developing new technologies to treat, prevent, forecast, and detect the emergence and spread of infectious diseases that have the potential to cause significant health, economic, and social burden.
  • Biomedical and Biodefense:
    • Understanding causal relationships that underlie acute and chronic disease states to support warfighter health.
    • Developing new technologies for the rapid, automated, and resilient manufacturing, delivery, and distribution of critical molecules for applications in therapeutics, chemical and biological defense.
    • Developing new technologies to support next-generation cellular therapeutic applications.
    • Developing new platform technologies for targeted, effective, spatiotemporally controlled delivery of large and small molecules and biologics.
    • Leveraging biotechnology to create new platform solutions that combat antimicrobial resistance, generate novel drug and cell-based therapeutics, and treat warfighter injury and illness.
    • Developing novel diagnostic, prophylactic, and therapeutic approaches for warfighter injury that can be provided even in austere settings and extreme conditions.

Defense Systems Office (DSO)

https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/dso>

The Defense Sciences Office (DSO) works to identify and create the next generation of scientific discovery to fuel innovation throughout the Agency and beyond.

Known as “DARPA’s DARPA,” DSO develops and manages an aggressive and forward-leaning portfolio that expands the art of the possible across a broad set of technical areas.

By pushing science toward fundamental operational limits, DSO programs create a strategic advantage for the DOD. DSO work is global in scale, monitoring and driving the technological landscape and potential impacts on the U.S. military and nation.

The DSO portfolio ranges from early idea development and scientific validation to prototype demonstration. Our primary solicitation mechanisms include Advanced Research Concepts (early idea scouting), Disruption Opportunities (validation of scientific and technical challenges), and Broad Area Announcements (capability demonstrations).

Non-exhaustive list of DSO thrusts:

  • Novel Materials and Structures
    • Science and technology in quantum devices
    • Atomic scale systems
    • Functional and structural materials
  • Sensing and Measurement
    • Science and technology in quantum sensing and metrology
    • Seeing (sensing) the unseen
    • Novel light sources
    • Computation and Processing
    • Science and technology of quantum computing
    • Cryptography, and modeling of complex systems
  • Enabling Operations 
    • Technologies to support space-based operations
    • Tactically remote environments
    • Resource assurance
  • Collective Intelligence
    • Exploration of complex social systems
    • Adaptable artificial intelligence (AI)
    • AI-accelerated learning
  • Emerging Threats
    • National security concerns related to global issues associated with raw material availability
    • Environmental catastrophes
    • Digital societies

The DARPA Defense Sciences Office regularly publishes Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) requesting responses to specific program topics. The OPEN BAA seeks revolutionary research ideas for topics not being addressed by ongoing DSO programs or other published solicitations. DSO Open BAA closing September 26, 2025: https://grants.gov/search-results-detail/356587.

Information Innovation Office

https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/i2o

The Information Innovation Office (I2O) creates groundbreaking science and delivers future capabilities in the informational and computational domains to surprise adversaries and maintain enduring advantage for national security.

I2O Thrust Areas

  • Proficient AI
    • Create state-of-the-art AI
    • Apply state-of-the-art AI to create new capabilities for national security
    • Develop techniques to mitigate the threats posed by AI systems
    • Define and create trustworthy AI systems, including those under threat of attack by skilled, high-resource adversaries
  • Resilient, adaptable, and secure software and systems
    • Dramatically enhance the security and resilience of both new and legacy software with a focus on practical and scalable approaches
    • Develop formal methods while leveraging AI and machine learning
    • Techniques and tools are provided as open-source software for use by the research and software development communities, the defense industrial base, and DOD.
  • Advantage in cyber operations 
    • Leveraging advances in state-of-the-art AI and secure and resilient tools and technologies to produce trustworthy cyber capabilities that operate beyond human capacity and speed
    • Anticipating adversary countermeasures to create enduring capabilities
  • Confidence in the information domain
    • Measuring the health of and protecting and detecting attacks on the information domain, broadly construed.
    • Research portfolio:
      • Cognitive: Beliefs and attitudes
      • Knowledge: Scientific discourse, the financial system, supply chains, and other areas
      • Tracking: Recording the digital artifacts of interactions with the myriad digital devices required by modern life
      • Transport: Delivery of electronic messages in many forms and with various gradations of observability

The DARPA Information Innovation Office regularly publishes Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) requesting responses to specific program topics. The OPEN BAA seeks revolutionary research ideas for topics not being addressed by ongoing ISO programs or other published solicitations.  ISO Open BAA closing October 29, 2025: https://grants.gov/search-results-detail/356587

Microsystems Technology Office

https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/mto

The Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) aims to ensure the U.S.’s continued technological dominance, both militarily and economically. To do this, MTO pushes today’s boundaries in foundational science to create transformational impact for tomorrow. This involves going beyond incremental improvements to existing technologies and seeking fundamental scientific breakthroughs that can create new capabilities and reshape entire industries.

MTO Thrust Areas

  • Circuit development to enable next generation microsystems
    • Photonic circuits (PCs)
    • Quantum circuits (QCs)
    • Organic circuits (OCs)
  • Microsystems manufacturing ecosystem
    • Exploring new additive, subtractive, and combination fabrication tools and technologies to enable sustainable manufacturing, technologies to speed up time to market, and foundational ecosystem enhancements with far-reaching impact beyond the new circuits of tomorrow.
  • Dual-use by design
    • Developing technologies with both military and commercial applications, focusing on innovations that not only strengthen national security but also enhance the U.S. economy.
    • Exploring new capabilities in design, integration, and hardware security that can take advantage of commercial scaling while also establishing differentiating capabilities in defense microsystems.

The DARPA Biological Systems Office regularly publishes Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) requesting responses to specific program topics. The BSO Open BAA seeks revolutionary research ideas for topics not being addressed by ongoing BSO programs or other published solicitations.  BSO Open BAA closing May 9, 2025: https://sam.gov/opp/51521dc0224e478088e727a3e95133e2/view

From BSO Open BAA:

Bio/Organic circuits (OCs). Biological and organic systems engage in complex computation and sensing activities continuously at an efficiency and effectiveness that often dwarfs their inorganic counterparts. MTO intends to invest in the integration of biomolecules and micro-technologies to establish the viability of OCs and explore hybrid bio-sensing and bio-compute microsystems. Disruptive research topics that support bio-based methods for high-speed, low-power compute and avenues for OCs that exceed performance of inorganic circuits are of specific interest.

Strategic Technology Office

https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/sto

The Strategic Technology Office (STO) develops technology to give national security leaders trusted, disruptive capabilities to win in all physical domains—air, space, sea, and land. Their work spans the spectrum of competition, from deterrence to high-end combat.  STO leverages advancements in microelectronics, computing capacity, applied machine learning/artificial intelligence, and other technologies to create advantages for U.S. forces and blunt adversarial strengths. They empower the nation to assert dominance in realms of diplomacy, information, military, economy, finance, intelligence, environment, and technology. 

STO Thrust areas

  • Advanced active and passive sensing
    • Developing novel technology and methods to find, detect, track, and follow difficult and elusive objects of interest.
    • Leverageing sensing technologies, including radio frequency, acoustic, and electro-optic/infrared, across all domains to create broad networks that leave adversaries with “nowhere left to hide.”
  • Effects
    • Advancing systems to achieve and counter kinetic and non-kinetic effects.
  • Command, control and communications
    • Creating technologies and concepts to empower human decision making and execute command and control with minimal communications in a highly dynamic threat environment. 
    • Spuring innovations to enhance operational and strategic efforts across the spectrum of conflict, ensuring adaptability, resilience, and reliability.
    • Enabling complexity management, decision aids, distributed autonomy and teaming, human behavior modeling, communication networks, and more.
  • New paradigm of systems warfare
    • Shaping the balance of power and to enable protracted engagements in contested environments.
    • Developing autonomous systems, technologies, and concepts that advance capabilities and address common issues such as limited communications, power, weight, adaptability, and cost.
  • Critical capabilities to promote national resilience
  • Developing capabilities to provide our nation with an advantage in expanding areas, such as commercial lunar infrastructure and the protection of critical infrastructure at home and among allies.
  • Leveraging advanced technologies to examine areas of commercial, financial, and industrial infrastructure to ensure the resilience of national systems, including energy, transportation, and communication services.

The DARPA Strategic Technology Office regularly publishes Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) requesting responses to specific program topics. The STO Open BAA seeks revolutionary research ideas for topics not being addressed by ongoing STO programs or other published solicitations.  STO Open BAA closing October 31, 2025: https://sam.gov/opp/4fec19a30ac44fcda1362c7c63be95a3/view

Current open BAA topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Human-machine symbiosis

Tactical Technology Office

https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/tto

The mission of the Tactical Technology Office (TTO) is to reimagine every aspect of military hardware design, development, test, manufacture, and sustainment – with a focus on rapid, affordable, and scalable deployment – in order to create and prevent technological surprise. TTO demonstrates compelling hardware at the smallest scale that traces to disruptive capability, with designs that reduce risk and cost by managing complexity and can be manufactured responsively and affordably.

TTO Thrust Areas

TTO seeks to enhance the nation’s ability to rapidly build, adapt, and sustain the joint force through the following focus areas. Recognizing that technology evolution is occurring at a pace unprecedented in history, TTO is interested in any fundamental technological disruptions that could provide the foundation for future DARPA programs, including topics that fall outside of these focus areas.

  • Platform Innovation
    • Designing, engineering, and demonstrating new and innovative platforms at credible scale, proving new enabling technologies that lead to disruptive systems concepts. This includes nontraditional systems engineering processes to increase the pace of innovation.
  • Missioned Autonomy
    • Applying autonomy as a force multiplier to enable the scaling of massed effects for defense applications
    • Focusing on trustworthiness, security, heterogenous platform cooperation, and one-to-many human-systems interfaces.
  • Managing Complexity
    • Reducing risk and cost through new methods of design space exploration and high-capacity computing that provide more efficient and complete insight on system architectures, deliver visibility into higher-order interactions, and enable focused and efficient testing.
    • Developing nontraditional systems engineering processes that promise to deliver faster design, engineering, and manufacturing of complex defense systems.
  • Freedom’s Forge 2.0
    • Building on the legacy of public and private cooperation for national security to make manufacturing, maintainability, and testing processes portable, affordable, and responsive.
    • Enabling rapid evolution from concept to manufacture and designing to support surge production. This includes cost awareness and cost control of manufactured articles.
  • Disruptive Emergent Technology
    • Identifying fundamental disruptions which could provide the foundation for future DARPA programs or DARPA/TTO focus areas.

The DARPA Tactical Technology Office regularly publishes Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) requesting responses to specific program topics. The TTO Open BAA seeks revolutionary research ideas for topics not being addressed by ongoing TTO programs or other published solicitations.  TTO Open BAA closing June 20, 2025:

https://sam.gov/opp/13edb5def87e45e98503450ffd5de95d/view

US Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC)

https://mrdc.health.mil/

USAMRDC manages and executes research in five basic areas: military infectious diseases, combat casualty care, military operational medicine, chemical biological defense, and clinical and rehabilitative medicine.

Resources

  • Program Announcements (PAs) identify basic and applied research topics. They are listed on the Grants.gov home page under the tab “Search Grants”: enter “12.420” in the CFDA criteria block.
  • USAMRMC Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) United States Army Medical Research and Development Command Broad Agency Announcement
    • Open continuously & generally reissued annually
    • Full proposals by invitation only; contact a program officer and submit a white paper before applying
  • USAMRMC new products and ideas submission tool: https://mrdc-npi.health.mil/index.cfm/submit/triage