Taskforce5
This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Offices of Basic Energy Sciences and Advanced Scientific Computing Research through the Biopreparednesss Research Virtual Enviornment (BRaVE) under contract number DE-AC02-O5CH11231 and specifically to Taskforce 5 (DOE-BRAVET5)
DOE’s BRaVE Initiative
In 2023, the Department of Energy announced funding for 10 research projects to support national biopreparedness and response capabilities. Our team, Taskforce 5, was granted one of those awards under the research focus of providing innovations in DOE’s user facility instrumentation, experimental techniques, and data analytics that will support biopreparedness and response.
Who are we
Taskforce 5 is a team of scientists from multiple national labs and universities whose expertise is being utilized to prepare for the next biothreat.
Objective
Our goal is to create the infrastructure and capabilities to transition from being bio-responsive to being bio-prepared. Our overarching aim is to develop and test three plug-and-play integrated DOE bio-imaging pipelines for rapid processing of therapeutic, diagnostic, and vaccine countermeasures against emerging biothreats.
Therapeutics
Improve a therapeutics pipeline that takes in a pathogen’s genomic sequence and outputs structure-function information and small molecules that disrupt viral mechanisms.
Diagnostics
To rapidly develop and enhance diagnostics, Taskforce 5 seeks to combine two of our discoveries: Protein antigen-based detection signal of SARSCoV-2 and Binary Biological Building Blocks.
Vaccines
We aim to develop a unique DOE platform to rapidly optimize lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for RNA vaccine design.
Computation
Taskforce 5 aims to integrate computational tools developed over decades and develop new tools for integrated collection and analysis.