Page 62 - FCW, August 2021

President’s Award
DARPA’s Pandemic Prevention Platform
The President’s Award differs from others that are part of the Federal 100 awards. The Eagle Awards and the Fed 100s themselves are for individual achievements made in a single calen- dar year. This award can be given to a team or individual, and often recog- nizes work over a longer period of time that has finally come to fruition.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was designed for just that sort of innovation.
Created in 1958, DARPA’s mission
is to look ahead and invest in emerg- ing technology for the military. One of its goals to protect U.S. troops around the world from biological hazards or attacks, and the agency has been fund- ing work on DNA and RNA vaccines and antibody treatments since 2011. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, that decade of research and development proved critical.
In 2013, DARPA awarded $25 mil- lion to Moderna to help establish its messenger RNA platform. That work laid the foundation for the creation of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) in 2014 and the Pandemic Pre- vention Platform (P3) in 2017. The goal of the P3 program was to develop a
scalable, adaptable rapid response plat- form that could produce the needed new vaccines or antibody treatments within 60 days of a new threat being identified.
In response to the COVID outbreak, Amy Jenkins, the P3 program man- ager, responded quickly and made awards to four groups to use the newly developed technology to develop a vac- cine for COVID-19, which was accom- plished in record time and has saved countless lives.
Many other individuals and organi- zations contributed to this success: former DARPA program managers Dan Wattendorf and Matt Hepburn, along with Geoff Ling, the BTO director at
that time, and former DARPA directors Regina Dugan and Arati Prabhakar. In addition, a large interagency group that included officials from the Department of Health and Human Services and its Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the National Institutes of Health, and the Pentagon’s Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense, played an essential role.
DARPA, however, was the catalyst, leading the effort for more than 10 years and its funding of potential vac- cines and antibody treatments created the framework for the deployment of new vaccines in record time.
60 August 2021 FCW.COM