The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), through its Biological Technologies Office (BTO), has issued Special Notice DARPA-SN-26-121 announcing a Proposers Day for the planned “High-throughput Unmasking of Biological Interactomes with Binding Landscape Emulators” (HUBBLE) program. HUBBLE targets one of the most consequential unsolved problems in computational biology: building an in-silico capability to map all protein-protein interactions (PPIs) across the human body, and using that map to identify novel diagnostic and therapeutic targets within complex physiologies. The Special Notice is not a request for proposals. It is an early-stage engagement opportunity in support of a planned Program Announcement (PA), giving prospective performers a direct line to the DARPA program team and a structured mechanism to form teams before the solicitation is released.
Program and Solicitation Overview
The HUBBLE Proposers Day will be held September 25, 2026, from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM ET at the SPA Arlington Research Collaboration Center (SPARCC), 4075 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, Virginia 22203. A hybrid option is available for those unable to travel, though all presenters must attend in person. Advance registration is required through the HUBBLE Proposers Day registration site, and there will be no same-day registration. All times in the announcement are Eastern Time.
DARPA’s stated goals for the event are to introduce the HUBBLE program vision and goals to the research community; explain the mechanics of a DARPA program and detail the objectives and milestones of this program in particular; increase efficiency in proposal preparation and evaluation; and encourage teaming among organizations with relevant expertise, research facilities, and capabilities. The agenda includes overview presentations by government personnel, an information session for participant questions, dedicated time for lightning talks, and an in-person teaming activity led by the DARPA team following the lightning talks.
The Special Notice establishes two distinct teaming mechanisms:
Lightning talks. Interested attendees may submit one Adobe PDF slide deck in landscape orientation summarizing their interests and capabilities, following the instructions in Attachment 1. Submissions are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis until the maximum number of slots is filled, and attendees must indicate their intention to submit a lightning talk during registration. Presentations are emailed to [email protected].
Teaming profiles. Interested parties may submit a one-page teaming profile using the Attachment 2 template describing technical competencies, unique facilities and other capabilities, and desired competencies sought from potential partners. At minimum, the profile must include contact information (name, organization, email, phone number, mailing address, website); a brief description of technical competencies and relevant facilities; and desired technical competencies and facilities from other potential team members, if applicable. Profiles must be in MS Word or Adobe PDF format. Submissions that do not use the provided template or that exceed one page will not be accepted. Multiple profiles from independent groups within the same institution are permitted.
Teaming profile content must be publicly releasable; submitters consent to distribution among event registrants. DARPA will email all conforming profiles to registrants by September 28, 2026. Team formation, communications, and networking remain the sole responsibility of participants, and neither DARPA nor the DoD endorses any participating organization.
Non-U.S. citizens face an additional requirement. All U.S. Permanent Residents and Foreign Nationals must submit a DARPA Form 60, except foreign government personnel, who must instead submit an Official Visit Request completed by their respective Embassy in Washington, DC. A Form 60 approved within the last six months remains valid and does not need to be resubmitted.
Attendance is not a requirement for submitting a proposal or being selected for funding, but DARPA strongly encourages participation and explicitly encourages participation by non-traditional performers, including small businesses, academic and research institutions, and first-time government contractors. Information relayed during the event will be posted to the BTO section of the DARPA Opportunities page.
The technical point of contact is Dr. Abhishek Singharoy, DARPA/BTO. All administrative and technical questions should be directed to [email protected], referencing Special Notice number DARPA-SN-26-121 in all correspondence.
Technical Objectives and Capability Areas
HUBBLE seeks to generate a comprehensive human interactome representing both healthy and disrupted physiologies. DARPA’s premise is a resource problem: at the current rate of discovery, experimentally characterizing all PPIs across cell types, disease conditions, and post-translational modification states would take thousands of years. Atomistic simulation is similarly infeasible at scale.
The program’s proposed workaround is dimensionality reduction. Rather than resolving each interaction in full atomistic detail, HUBBLE will generate low-dimensional signatures of each protein interaction based on the topology of its diffusive binding landscape. Performers are expected to seed signature libraries from established databases as a launching point, then extend into the “dark interactome” — the vast set of interactions that have never been experimentally characterized.
The intended end state is a hypercatalog of context-aware interactions with predicted probabilities, affinities, and kinetics, specific to the cell types and conditions in which those interactions occur. DARPA plans to apply the resulting capability to complex physiological states such as traumatic brain injury, modeling the causal networks that drive injury outcomes. Predicted interaction networks will be validated and interrogated for causality and contribution to physiological outcomes, producing weighted, directional associations between protein targets.
DARPA frames this as a paradigm shift away from simple quantification of protein abundance toward a functional representation of disease, one the agency believes could catalyze a new generation of diagnostic and therapeutic tools to protect the warfighter.
Organizations with capabilities in the following areas are well positioned for HUBBLE:
- Computational structural biology and protein-protein interaction prediction
- Molecular dynamics, coarse-grained modeling, and dimensionality-reducing simulation methods
- Machine learning applied to structural and interaction data
- Curation and integration of large-scale interactome and proteomics databases
- Experimental validation of predicted interactions, including causality testing
- Traumatic brain injury pathophysiology and neuro-proteomics
- High-performance computing infrastructure for large-scale biological simulation
Key Dates and Submission Timeline
All times are Eastern Time:
- September 18, 2026, 4:00 PM: Registration deadline for both in-person and hybrid attendance, or when capacity is reached, whichever comes first. Individuals unable to register will be placed on a waitlist and slots filled on a first-come, first-served basis if they become available.
- September 18, 2026: Deadline for DARPA Form 60 or Official Visit Request submissions from non-U.S. citizens.
- September 21, 2026, 4:00 PM: Lightning talk presentations due to [email protected].
- September 21, 2026: One page teaming profiles due to [email protected].
- September 25, 2026, 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM: HUBBLE Proposers Day, SPARCC, Arlington, VA (hybrid option available).
What This Means for Prospective Performers
HUBBLE is an ambitious swing. Mapping the full human interactome in silico with cell-type and condition specificity, and with predicted affinities and kinetics rather than binary interaction calls would reset how the biomedical community defines a therapeutic target. The traumatic brain injury demonstration signals that DARPA wants more than a database; it wants causal, directional networks that hold up under experimental interrogation and translate into diagnostics and countermeasures for the warfighter.
That scope has a practical implication for anyone considering this pursuit: very few organizations can cover simulation methods, machine learning, database curation, and wet-lab validation under one roof. Teaming will not be optional for most performers, and the window to position is short. The teaming profile and lightning talk deadlines both fall on September 21, with registration closing three days earlier on September 18, and capacity limits mean the practical deadline may arrive sooner. The highest-value work between now and then is deciding where your capability credibly fits within HUBBLE’s technical vision, identifying the gaps you need a partner to fill, and getting a sharp, compliant one-page profile in front of the full registrant list before the Program Announcement drops.
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For additional information on where your capabilities could plug into this emerging program, schedule a conversation with our team.
