DARPA wants to modify warfighters’ red blood cells to operate in dangerous environments more effectively

DARPA is looking to modify red blood cells with either natural or synthetic “cargoes” to aid warfighters’ abilities in dangerous and extreme environments.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is putting together the Red Blood Cell Factory (RBC-Factory) research program that aims to “create a medical device-based platform to accessorize human red blood cells (RBCs) with additional biologically active components (aka cargoes),” according to a special notice.

The idea is that loading red blood cells with biologically active cargoes like “small molecules, peptides, proteins, pigments, colloids, and nanomaterials” will enhance soldiers’ abilities to operate more efficiently in extreme environments.

Prior to deployment, warfighters may have little-to-no physiological preparation or protection, so DARPA is betting that “red blood cells with cargoes will allow recipients to maintain performance in these environments.”

The primary point of contact for the RBC-Factory program is Dr. Christopher Bettinger, a Full Professor in the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who joined DARPA in 2022.

Dr. Bettinger’s has led several DARPA research programs, including:

• ADvanced Acclimation and Protection Tool for Environmental Readiness (ADAPTER) to develop an “implantable or ingestible bioelectronic carrier” that would eliminate the five major bacteria associated with traveler’s diarrhea.
• Harnessing Enzymatic Activity for Lifesaving Remedies (HEALR) to treat microbial infections with novel medical countermeasures that result in host-driven degradation or deactivation of pathogen targets.
• Ice Control for cold Environments (ICE) to “develop solutions for extreme cold weather DOD operational challenges by discovering and optimizing biologically sourced or inspired molecules to enable tuned inhibition or nucleation of ice crystallization, propagation, and adhesion.”
• Synthetic Hemo-technologIEs to Locate and Disinfect (SHIELD) to “develop prophylaxes that can be broadly administered to trauma victims in combat casualty care scenarios which will rapidly clear multiple bloodborne bacterial and fungal pathogens, limit morbidity and mortality, and protect the recipient for up to 7 days.”
• Simulating Microbial Systems (SMS) to “create computational simulations that accurately predict the behavior of bacteria in various contexts.”

With the RBC-Factory program, DARPA is looking for “novel approaches to modify RBC at scale with demonstrations that are substantiated by prototypes” while “approaches that seek to introduce new genetic material or modify existing genetic material are out of scope for RBC-Factory.”

For many years the Pentagon has been investigating how to fundamentally alter what it means to be human, funding research into creating super humans that are smarter, faster, and stronger through human performance enhancement.

Examples of human performance enhancement given in a RAND report from November, 2021 include:

• Adding reptilian genes that provide the ability to see in infrared
• Fostering specific physical attributes (e.g., ability to cope with low oxygen levels) that could aid warfighters
• Increasing muscle mass in disease-free humans
• Increasing an average runner’s endurance to the level of an elite marathoner
• For space travel and living on other planets: Adding genes from Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium that can survive in high levels of radiation, and adding genes from a variety of organisms to enable humans to synthesize all 20 amino acids (humans normally synthesize only 11 and extract the remaining nine from food)

For the US Defense and Intelligence communities, human performance enhancement offers “the potential to increase strength, speed, endurance, intelligence, and tolerance of extreme environments and to reduce sleep needs and reaction times—could aid in the development of better operators,” according to RAND.

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