On Aug. 27, 2003, The Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB) announced it was funding a $50 million five year partnership with MIT, the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the California Institute of Technology.   The partnership aimed to understand and harness biological mechanisms for fabrication of new materials and devices to equip the soldier of the 21st century. 

The Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB) was founded earlier in the year as an Army-sponsored University Affiliated Research Center (UARC).

Nature creates high-performance materials in a non-toxic fashion and assembles them at the nanoscale with a level of precision currently beyond human capability. ICB aims to study and replicate some of those processes to benefit industry and the public.

The institute will work on sensors, electronics and information processing; and biotechnological and biologically inspired routes to electronic, optical and magnetic materials (including new approaches to the generation of electricity for defense applications) and to information processing.

“The inspiration for the ICB comes from the fact that biology uses different mechanisms to produce materials and integrated circuits for high-performance sensing, computing and information processing, and actuation than are presently used in human manufacturing,” said Robert Campbell, ARO program officer.