DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA https://www.darpa.mil is working on a number of research studies related to medicine and healthcare to not only help warfighters maintain their health and safety in the field but also help many others in the general population.
One research program called “Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics” (ADEPT), is developing technologies capable of rapidly identifying and responding to threats resulting from natural plus engineered diseases and toxins.
The ADEPT program is developing simple-to-use on demand diagnostics for medical decision-making to accurately track threats, developing new types of vaccines with increased potency, and also developing more efficient targeted drug delivery systems.
DARPA’s initial research in this field called the “In Vivo Nanoplatforms” (IVN) program, is developing in vivo sensing technologies and therapeutics. The program is pursing technologies to provide early indications of physiological abnormalities or illnesses that can be proactively addressed with therapeutics or supportive care. The goal is to produce a platform that will provide continuous physiological monitoring.
The second program in the in-vivo category called “IVN Therapeutics” (IVN:Tx), is looking to rapidly treat disease by pursuing treatments to increase safety and minimize the dose required for clinically relevant efficacy. The goal is to increase effectiveness by targeting delivery for drugs to specific tissues. If successful, this platform will be able to prevent and treat infections caused by multi-drug resistant organisms.
Another program called the “Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) is using technologies to enable precision control of and sensory feedback from sensor equipped upper limb prosthetic devices. If the research is completely successful, the resulting system would provide users with near natural control of prosthetic hands and arms via bidirectional peripheral nerve implants.
The “Dialysis-Like Therapeutics” (DLT) program will hopefully deliver a new tool to provide immediate support for rapid response to emerging infectious disease threats. The DLT program specifically addresses sepsis, but DARPA is also working to expand the DLT technology to also deal with harmful bacteria, viruses, fungi, and toxic agents in the blood.
A program called “Warfighter Analytics using Smartphones for Health” (WASH) program is using data collected from cell phone sensors to enable researchers to use novel algorithms to conduct continuous real-time assessments of the health and welfare of warfighters 24/7.
The goal is for WASH to extract physiological signals which may be weak and noisy when embedded in data obtained through existing mobile device sensors. The hope is to extract and analyze data from mobile phones to determine the current health status of the individual or warfighter.
DARPA’s “Electrical Prescriptions” (ElectRx) program is examining how to find effective ways to deliver non-pharmacological treatments for pain, inflammation, post-traumatic stress, severe anxiety, and trauma. The ElectRx devices and therapeutic systems under development are now ready to enter into clinical studies.