As You Likely Know, DARPA Is the Original and Largest Federal Advanced Research Projects

As you likely know, DARPA is the original and largest federal Advanced Research Projects Agency. As part of the Department of Defense, their resources are plentiful, and their mission is to identify bold, high risk, potentially impactful projects based on short white papers, and fund them quickly and adequately. They recently launched a new Biological Technologies Office, and they are looking for signature projects to support.

UCSF has negotiated an important variation from the standard DARPA funding mechanism, which traditionally begins with a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for a circumscribed project or area, with a deadline for submission of short white papers that address the project area.

In our agreement with DARPA, there is no BAA, no DARPA-specified project, and no deadlines. Rather, UCSF investigators would merely submit white papers describing a transformative approach to an important problem in precision medicine, an umbrella that covers all biological research from fundamental discovery to patient care. DARPA’s promise is that every submission will be seriously read and thoughtfully considered (a promise that you may have noticed is not offered at all federal agencies), and they will fund those that they find most exciting.

While there are DARPA-funded investigators at UCSF, this avenue for support is not commonly used here, and DARPA project management policies are not well known. Nevertheless, we hope to establish a robust pipeline of DARPA-supported research at UCSF.

To facilitate this, the RDO will host an information and discussion session with a panel of faculty who have “DARPA experience”, on March 30th from 2:30 – 4:00 pm in Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall. The panelists will briefly describe their projects and experience, and respond to process questions and provide tips to interacting productively with DARPA. So save this date and time, and we hope to see you there!

Sincerely,

Keith R. Yamamoto, PhD

Vice Chancellor for Research, UCSF

Executive Vice Dean, School of Medicine

Professor, Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology