The US Department of Defense (DoD) is one of the biggest backers of biomaterials research in the world. Its mission to preserve the US’ military edge have led it down cutting edge biotechnological pathways for decades.
Since 2021, however, the agency has pushed beyond R&D, becoming a major actor in the scaling biomanufacturing technologies that already exist.
As the DoD takes an active role in building out the US renewable materials industry, we look at the reasons for its interest in biomaterials and how it reached its pre-eminent position in the US biobased ecosystem.
Building domestic military supply chains
The US Department of Defense is not the only US government agency tasked with federal biotechnology research but it is one of the biggest. Presiding over the army, navy, air force, plus DARPA and DTRA, it has the resources and remit to explore both basic and applied research in biomaterials.
The reasons for the DoD’s interest in biomateirals has changed over time, from sharpening its bioterrorism capabilities to finding new ways of enhancing combat performance. Today, its involvement in biomaterials is part of a wider bid by the US government to shore up US supply chains for strategic materials: one exampe of the increasingly close ties between the renewables industries and national security.
The US military is one of the world’s biggest consumers of material, reliant on many different manufacturing industries to produce at speed and scale. Many of these industrial supply chains rely on foreign imports, including from potential geopolitical adversaries.
This import dependence puts the US’ strategic autonomy at risk. Today, federal US policymaking is dominated by the aim of building up domestic supply chains, a response to the supply shocks caused by Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
While metal and minerals used to manufacture military goods tend to be heavily concentrated in clusters around the globe, biological resources like farming waste or corn crops are more evenly distributed. Major agricultural regions like North America are especially abundant in organic feedstock.
Recently, the Dod has participated in a number of federal schemes that inject funds into US-made biobased products that could strengthen the US resource and industrial base. The most prominent is BioMade. Established in 2021, the programme aims to scale up domestic US bioindustrial manufacturing by awarding funds for innovative research and de-risking new infrastructure needed to build strategic goods at home.
BioMade’s focus is to bring products to commercialisation. For this purpose, it has established a national infrastructure network of pilot-scale facilities, key to taking promising new tech out of the lab and into the market.
Biobricks and biorubber
Biobased bricks are one biomaterial being developed under BioMade, supervised by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The technology forms biocement using liquid cultures of microorganisms mixed with sand, rock, and chemical feedstocks such as urea. ARFL is demonstrating the feasibility of making these basic cement mixtures at pilot scale, with a view to transitioning production to commercial partners.
Biocement may not have the glamour of some other sophisticated biotech ventures that the DoD has been working on. However, it has an immediate practical use for the Air Force because it allows the agency to build temporary runways efficiently and at low cost, using materials that are easy to source anywhere in the world.
Another BioMade Air Force Research Laboratory project is to develop domestic sources of natural rubber from the Kok-saghyz dandelion. Eventually, the natural rubber will be used to make military aircraft tires. This project, a collaboration with Farmed Materials, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, is driven by strategic concerns about risks to global supply chains and the possibility that adversaries may cut off strategic raw materials exports to the US.
Supporting the private sector
As the natural rubber partnership shows, the DoD and its branches also collaborate widely with the private sector. These public-private R&D partnerships are not new. By 2000, the DoD was already the largest agency to particiapte in the military-industry partnership agreement known as CRADA.
The Navy led the way in defense-private biomaterials crossovers. In 2003, it worked with private companies on a project developing an underwater adhesive through mimicking adhesives produced by marine organisms.
More recently, under Joe Biden’s push for a domestic military industry supply chain, the DoD announced that it would work with large and small businesses to strengthen domestic supply chains and manufacturing in biotechnology under the Distributed Bioindustrial Manufacturing Program (DBIMP).
The first phase of investment saw the DoD give 9 awards to bioindustrial firms: Amyris, Cauldron Molecules, Checkerspot, DSM Nutritional Products, EVERY, The Fynder Group, Liberation Labs, Perfect Day, and Solugen.
DoD support is welcome for many biobased companies because it is more open to financial risk than private investors. Federal backing can support the fine-tuning and production of highly innovative products that hold military uses but may not yet have mass market appeal or where costs are still too high to reach ordinary consumers.
Historic roots
Biomaterials and biomanufacturing have been key concerns for the DoD for decades. Already by the late eighties the DoD was the biggest spender on biotech R&D, second only to the National Institutes of Health.
Some of its reserach programmes were incredibly ambitious. Back in 1989, a DoD report envisaged the invention of a low-cost, artificial human blood substitute. Artificial blood has only relatively recently gone into its first ever clinical trials. Yet over 30 years ago, the DoD was pursuing it as a matter of urgency to achieve ‘enhanced combat performance, nerve cell repair, and immune system enhancement’.
Medical biotech was not the end of its biobased ambitions. The late eighties also saw the department aim at developing recombinant derived fibres. These are fibres produced by genetically modified microorganisms and the DoD’s targets included biosynthetic polymers, bioelastomers, biobased antifoulants, bioadhesives, bio-based lubricants. Materials made from recombinant DNA techniques are just starting to be commercialised today.
Bioelectronics – still an emerging field today – was another concern. Living organisms would form ‘self-assembling’ moolcular arrays and switches. Scientists are still trying to work out how living organisms could take the place of metal and plastic to create radically new forms of programmable hardware.
Silk for combat
Many biomaterials now emerging in the private sector were old hat to the military departments three decades ago. One of these was silk based materials which today startups like Spiber produce using microbes.
Natural silk-based fibres are a good example of how natural materials can hold advanced applications in the military unmatched by synthetic creations. The DoD research notes from 1989 notes that spider and worm silk have ‘tensile strengths greater than steel and elasticity greater than wool’.
The DoD also innovated not just in biomaterials but in biomanufacturing. Today, the industrial applications of precision fermentation are getting immense investor attention in the private sector. Yet long before companies were using microorganisms in a targeted way to solve industrial problems, the DoD was investigating the functional uses of microorganisms.
Rather than aiming to cultivate and harvest spider and worm silk from living organisms, the DoD in the late eighties envisaged ‘methods for in-vitro production’ and the cloning of the genes responsible for specific materials.
Other biomanufacturing research centred on how to use microbe enzymes and metabolisms to clean up after waste, paint strip, decontaminate areas, and mine for minerals from low grade ores.
Using living organisms in precise and targeted ways necessitated basic research into their biological processes. By 1999, 26.2% of the DoD’s academic research budget was 2geared towards the life sciences, second behind computers at 34.5%, showing its double interest in applied and fundamental research.
Evolving security risks
Funding for research into biotechnology only heighted with post-9/11 security concerns about bioterrorism. The DoD was one of the main agencies to benefit from this increased cash flow to biological research and by 2009, all DoD organisations actively involved in some aspect of biotech R&F rose to almost $80 billion.
Post-9/11 DoD research quickly went beyond the basic remit of understanding bioterror threats, giving rise to new bio-inspired and biobased materials. Nanotechnology and biotechnology in general became increasing areas of interest for the DoD and its many branches during this period.
During the 2000s, highly sensitive biobased sensors were seen as the pinnacle of DoD biotech research, useful for enhancing environmental awareness in combat. Also at the top of the biotech agenda were self-assembling and self-healing biobased structures and nano-biomaterials. Investigations into biobased sensors and nano-biotech were dominated by the Army’s Institute for Collaborative Biotechnology, which received $33 million over 2004 to 2008 to pursue these research concerns.
The strategic reasons behind DoD involvement in biomaterials R&D have changed over the years. However, the agency has remained a key entity in pushing the boundaries of the field. It now promises to play a much bigger role in scaling dual-use biobased technologies, reaching beyond military applications and supporting industrial onshoring in the US.