US DOE funds MIT drill core tech to speed up critical minerals discovery

Synthetic biology company Fieldstone Bio announced that in partnership with hyperspectral imaging company TerraCore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (MIT) it has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E to develop a field-deployable system for rapid, non-destructive characterization of critical minerals on drill cores. 

The award comes through ARPA-E’s ROCKS program. Fieldstone will develop a system that measures critical minerals directly on drill cores at the exploration site, delivering results in hours rather than the weeks or months that conventional lab assays require. 

The program supports the development of a method that pairs engineered microbial sensors with compact hyperspectral cameras already common in mining workflows. The microbes are designed to produce a distinct, readable signal when they sense a target metal.  

The amount of funding was not disclosed.

Fieldstone’s imaging and analysis system then translates those signals into a quantitative, high-resolution map of metal distribution along the full length of a core. The goal is to help the United States find and characterize domestic sources of the critical minerals its defense, energy, and manufacturing sectors depend on, and currently import. 

“In exploration, the data that would change your next decision often arrives after you’ve already made it,” Fieldstone Bio CEO Patrick Stone said in a news release. “When you can measure what’s in a core while you’re still standing at the drill site, the economics change. You can tighten your intervals, stop chasing dead ends, and put your next meters where they actually count. That’s what this technology is built to do.” 

For mining teams, core characterization today involves a fundamental tradeoff. Laboratory assays such as fire assay and ICP-MS deliver the sensitivity and accuracy the industry depends on, but require shipping samples off-site and waiting through lab queues, often for weeks.  

Faster on-site methods exist, but infer metal content indirectly through mineral proxies, missing the direct read that drives confident decisions. Fieldstone’s approach is designed to close that gap: direct, sensitive, core-length metal mapping that happens where the drilling does, it said.  

Scout Discoveries, an exploration company advancing new targets across the Western USA, including gold, will contribute active drill sites and fresh core to validate the technology under real-world field conditions. 

The scientific foundation traces to MIT, where researchers in the lab of Dr. Christopher Voigt developed the engineered reporter technology that makes microbial signals readable by hyperspectral imaging at a distance—work recently published in Nature Biotechnology. Fieldstone licensed the technology and has since demonstrated sensors for gold, copper, molybdenum, and arsenic at parts-per-billion sensitivity. 

“Engineered biosensors have been difficult to use in the field because their signals needed specific, sensitive and expensive specialized equipment,” said Dr. Voigt, co-founder of Fieldstone Bio and Head of the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT.

“Making those signals visible to widely-available HSI cameras is what turns a laboratory technique into a field tool. Pointing it at the critical minerals this country needs to source domestically is exactly the kind of problem it should be solving.” 

Under the program, Fieldstone will expand its sensor library to include rare earth elements and nickel, validate performance on freshly extracted cores at active exploration sites with TerraCore and Scout Discoveries, and build the integrated system needed for on-site deployment. The work is designed so that no engineered microbes are released into the environment, with the biosensors applied directly to core samples within standard core-handling workflows.