Senior Official: Dr. Gary Vora

• Mission: Assuring operational advantages through advanced biotechnology solutions and secure supply chains
• Vision: Support domestic biotechnology to fill capability gaps in critical military supply chains, simplify logistics, and provide materials with novel properties

Biotechnology will deliver new capabilities to DoD and the warfighter by:

• Producing materials with novel characteristics and properties for military systems - such as tunable paints and coatings for signature management or growable concrete
• Developing new methods for sensing and monitoring the environment and the warfighter
• Augmenting performance and protecting the warfighter from harsh environments
• Rapidly producing medical countermeasures
• Sourcing mission-critical materials, such as fuels, without relying on fragile supply chains
• Improving in-theater interoperability, resilience, and robustness of critical components
• Reducing logistical timelines and burden for deployment and resupply by providing point-of-need manufacturing

U.S. Bioindustrial Manufacturing Challenges

• Inadequate domestic infrastructure: The lack of domestic biomanufacturing infrastructure and prototyping capabilities
• Reliance on overseas manufacturing: The inability to scale multiple classes of products and the lack of direct capital assistance have led U.S. biotech innovators to turn to foreign manufacturers for scale-up and commercialization
• Technology protection and cybersecurity: Biotechnology-associated data present emerging issues in product security
• Workforce: An increasing demand on the biotechnology talent pool may outpace resources, resulting in capacity gaps across all biotechnology related occupations