Universal Cell Culture Platform for Rapid Establishment of Species-Agnostic Cell Lines and Autonomous Culture Operations

SBIR · Phase: BOTH · Topic DPA26BZ05-DV020 · Solicitation 26.BZ

Cell culture is foundational to modern biotechnology, biomanufacturing, drug discovery, vaccine production, regenerative medicine, and genetic engineering. However, most established cell culture protocols, media formulations, and immortalized or pluripotent cell lines exist only for well-characterized "model" organisms (e.g., human, mouse, rat). For many vertebrate species, including those of emerging interest to defense, biosecurity, agricultural, conservation, and public-health stakeholders, no validated cell culture baseline exists. Filling this gap is critical for gene-drive and genetic-biocontrol research. Gene drives, genetic elements engineered to propagate a trait through a target population faster than standard inheritance, hold significant promise for controlling disease vectors, suppressing invasive or pest species, and protecting agriculture, ecosystems, and public health. Yet engineering, optimizing, validating and characterizing the safety and efficacy of gene-drive constructs requires robust, species-specific cell lines for the target organism that can enable rapid in vitro assessment of drive activity (e.g., homing/conversion efficiency, off-target activity, and stability) that would otherwise require slow, whole-organism breeding studies. Establishing cell culture for a novel, non-model species today is a slow and irreproducible process. It requires years of manual optimization across an enormous parameter space (media composition, growth factors, substrate, oxygen tension, temperature, passaging cadence, reprogramming-factor delivery, and differentiation cues), depends heavily on individual operator skill, and frequently fails to transfer between laboratories. This bottleneck limits the speed for standing up new biological capabilities, constrains the breadth and resilience of the bioeconomy, and directly impedes the responsible development of gene-drive and biocontrol countermeasures. This Phase II SBIR topic seeks a generalizable platform that fundamentally changes this paradigm by combining (1) species-agnostic biological methods for deriving and maintaining cells from arbitrary vertebrate and invertebrate species, (2) autonomous, closed-loop automation that systematically explores culture parameter space and produces reproducible, transferable protocols and cell lines, and (3) the cellular substrate and engineering workflows needed to build and validate in vitro testbeds for gene-drive technologies in those cell lines. Proposers must address Component 1 and Component 2 below, and are highly encouraged to address Component 3. A proposer may submit only one proposal to this topic. Component 1: Cross-Species Universality (Species-Agnostic Cell Culture & iPSC Derivation) Develop generalizable biological methods that allow viable, stable cell lines to be established from diverse, non-model vertebrate and invertebrate species without bespoke, multi-year, per-species protocol development. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: • Universal or rapidly tunable media, substrate, and supplement formulations applicable across taxonomically diverse species (e.g., across multiple vertebrate classes such as mammals and reptiles). • Species-agnostic strategies for primary cell isolation, immortalization, and/or induced pluripotency (iPSC reprogramming), including reprogramming-factor delivery and selection approaches that generalize across species. • Methods for establishing, characterizing, and validating pluripotency, viability, genomic stability, and lineage differentiation potential in species lacking established reference reagents or markers. • A principled, design-of-experiments (DOE) or model-driven framework for rapidly converging on viable culture conditions for a previously uncharacterized species. • Cryopreservation, banking, and quality-control approaches that ensure cell line stability and reproducibility across time and locations. Component 2: Autonomous, Closed-Loop Culture Automation Develop a…

SBIR/STTR 은 미국 중소기업만 지원할 수 있습니다(Small Business Act 법정 요건). • 계열사를 포함해 상시 종업원 500명 이하 • 미국 시민 또는 영주권자 1인 이상이 50%를 초과해 직접 소유·지배 • 미국 내 사업장을 두고 주로 미국 내에서 사업을 영위할 것 • 수행책임자(PI)의 주된 근무처가 신청 기업일 것 출처: https://www.sbir.gov/faq/eligibility-requirements

Primary country

🇺🇸 United States

Also eligible

None

Foreign companies

No

Local entity

Required

Location condition

미국 내 사업장을 두고 미국 시민·영주권자가 50%를 초과해 소유한 중소기업만 신청할 수 있습니다(법정 요건).

Document requirements were not captured (needs verification). Check the official announcement.

Application process not captured.

Evaluation process not captured.

Process steps were not captured.

Generated by local:rules-v1 · 3h ago

The announcement does not say what has to be submitted, so the disclosure exposure cannot be judged. the scope of the material requested is not stated. The awarding body is U.S. Department of War — DARPA. 8 fields could not be read and must be checked in the announcement and the grant agreement.

This assessment is derived from the stored announcement, document and contract fields. Anything the source does not state is marked "needs verification" — it never asserts that your idea will be taken. Generated by local:rules-v1 · 3h ago

Official URL

https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/topics-app/

Application URL

https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/topics-app/

Last fetched

2026.08.20

Human review

Not reviewed — check the official announcement

First seen

2026.08.20

Data status

Auto-collected, not reviewed

AI enrichment

local:rules-v1 · 3h ago