Real-Time Pathogen-Host Interactome Prediction
SBIR Opportunity Analysis
The Department of Defense, through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is seeking Direct to Phase II proposals to develop and validate a real-time pathogen-host interactome prediction system. The selected contractor must deliver an operationally deployable computational pipeline that predicts host-pathogen protein interactions from sequence data alone, performs zero-shot prediction on unseen pathogens, and generates ranked infection pathway hypotheses. Technical requirements include completing core predictions within 15 minutes, generating full characterization reports within an hour on standard hardware, and experimentally validating at least 25 novel predicted interactions during a nine-month base period and a nine-month option period. Proposers must demonstrate Phase I feasibility through prior benchmark performance data, zero-shot validation, and pipeline demonstrations. Proposals must be submitted between the opening date of June 24, 2026, and the closing deadline of July 22, 2026, at 4:00 PM Eastern Time.