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The UK’s agency for “high impact science” is setting its sights on fighting emerging biological threats and extending people’s healthy lifespans among its latest targets for research.
The two-year-old Advanced Research and Invention Agency has appointed eight more programme directors to widen its targets as it prepares to allocate the second half of its initial £800mn five-year funding.
Aria was created by the previous Conservative government but has become a crucial part of the Labour administration’s search for high-value innovation to boost sluggish economic growth.
The agency is publicly funded but its researchers have unusual freedom to shape their work, inspired by the frontier science work done at US government organisations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Aria’s announcement is “essentially a recognition that we’ve grown confident enough that we’re able to unlock these new areas and communities of researchers”, chief executive Ilan Gur told the Financial Times.
“They are people coming from the coalface with the goal of looking across the research landscape at the big opportunities . . .[that are missing and] that the system probably won’t otherwise fund right now,” he added.
Life sciences loom large in Aria’s expanded priorities, reflecting in part big advances over the past few years in synthetic biology and understanding of how cells function. Nathan Wolfe, one of the new programme directors, plans to investigate whether energy flows in living systems could be manipulated to prevent debilitating chronic diseases.
Wolfe will examine mitochondria, the structures that generate energy in animal cells. His work will build on research suggesting mitochondrial malfunctions are linked to conditions including type two diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
“Increasingly, I think these may be thought of as diseases of energy,” Wolfe, a US virologist, epidemiologist and entrepreneur. “It’s a huge luxury to take these kinds of shots on goal — to be able to do big things.”
A second strand of Aria’s investigations is early detection and prevention of emerging biological threats. Technological advances can help predict novel risks including potentially pandemic-causing pathogens, said Nicole Wheeler, a new programme director with expertise in artificial intelligence and biosecurity.
“We’re at the point, with the amount of genomic data we have and the advances in AI in biology, where we can start thinking seriously about ‘how do we find the thing that we’re not looking for?’” said Wheeler, who proposes using AI to trawl millions of published scientific papers to identify possible warnings.
Aria’s new priorities also include exploiting atmospheric energy sources such as wind shear and thermal air currents to power long duration, and even limitless, flight. Another project will investigate adaptive synthetic materials that mimic natural structures to make food, goods and medicines sustainably and on demand.
Labour has offered Aria strong backing since it took power in July. Existing agency projects, such as to cut the cost of computing for artificial intelligence more than a thousand-fold, dovetail with government industrial priorities.
The agency’s £69mn precision neurotechnologies programme is collaborating with the NHS, US start-up Forest Neurotech, and the University of Plymouth to find treatments for conditions such as Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and depression.
Aria should play a “great role” in helping the UK to “innovate our way out of the challenges that we have”, said Peter Kyle, science, innovation and technology secretary.
“Aria has a risk profile that no other funding body has,” Kyle said, noting that “by definition” its work would sound unusual and sometimes even eccentric. “But if it doesn’t sound those things, then other countries would have done it,” he added.
