Unbiased Behavioral Discovery Platforms
SBIR Opportunity Analysis
DARPA, within the Department of Defense, is seeking SBIR solutions for unbiased behavioral discovery platforms that can improve detection and medical countermeasure development for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. The effort calls for automated, high-throughput behavioral profiling tools for preclinical animal models that can detect novel behaviors, quantify intervention effects, and support multiple physiologies such as toxidromes, neuropsychiatric disorders, seizures, traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative disorders, and sleep state. Proposed systems must use non-invasive measurements, avoid human annotation, integrate multiple behavioral feature spaces, minimize animal handling, and demonstrate better sensitivity and specificity than state-of-the-art behavioral assays, including detection at subclinical doses or presymptomatic disease states. This is open under topic HR0011SB20254-15, with applications due May 13, 2026 at 4:00 PM ET.