The Pentagon's R&D arm, DARPA - the very driving force behind the Internet and GPS - reformed itself three years ago to create a new office dedicated to solving the trade secrets of biology. The new Biological Technology Office (BTO) has set itself the task of "harnessing the power of biological systems" and developing new defense technologies, of course. Over the past year, with a budget of nearly $ 300 million, he has researched the problems of improving memory, symbiosis between machines and humans, and accelerating disease detection and response.
DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is hoping for a massive payoff. BTO director and neuroprosthetics researcher Justin Sanchez told Scientific American what to expect from his department in 2017, including work on neural implants to help healthy people in their daily lives and other technologies that he says will "change the rules of the game." medicine. Wondering what the newest office of the US Defense Agency is up to? Yes, for me. Let's listen to Sanchez.
Before your department was established in April 2014, DARPA was already working on several biological projects, including research into antibiotic resistance and mental health interventions. What has changed with the creation of your office?
We have been doing biological work - at the intersection of biology and engineering - for many years, but it has been scattered throughout our other departments. This office was a recognition that biological technology was going to play a critical role not only in the direction of movement of our country, but also other countries, so we needed to focus an all-encompassing effort and move forward.
I am particularly intrigued by the robust BTO to develop programmable microbes to produce the needed drugs on the fly - and thereby bypass the issues of stockpiling of the needed drugs or complex transport logistics. Sounds amazing. At what stage is this work now?
This program is called "living foundries" - as if we are going to cast something alive. Traditionally, we use chemistry to create new compounds or new drugs. But lately, we've realized that microbes like yeast and bacteria can make compounds too, and we can program them to make those compounds by first understanding which chemical pathways they use. Take yeast, for example. Yeast uses sugar in a variety of ways to make alcohols. If you reprogram these tracks, you could force the yeast to create many other compounds that they initially did not know how to produce, and we will still use the same raw material: sugar.
Our teams are developing genetic codes that can be used to reprogram yeast. This idea could turn our compound manufacturing process around. The program is tasked with producing 1000 new molecules over the course of the program (which is three years away) and our teams are doing well. I think they have already produced about 100 new compounds that are produced by yeast. It's like taking biology and marrying it with engineering tools and then creating something with them.
So you are at the very beginning of the path to creating connections?
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Yes. They are all produced in milligrams, but eventually the program will start producing kilograms of them.
If we can create these brand new compound foundries, we can flip both drug manufacturing and non-medical approaches, because this is a platform. Whatever connection you are interested in, there are many possibilities.
How will the election of a new president and the Republican Congress affect your work?
We usually don't get caught up in such things. DARPA's mission remains unchanged regardless of the political climate. Our mission is to create disruptive technologies for national security. It is our job and role to think ahead of the world about science and technology. I think this mission goes beyond the political landscape. We have a very strict mission and we are trying to secure our country, so this election cycle is just one of many.
Which BTO project do you admire the most in 2017?
It's like with children - you can't have one pet. I have many favorites. Let me share a few that will be especially important in 2017. First, there is an area called “advancing infectious diseases”. Our current approach, when a new pathogen comes to our shores, is not very effective. We want to be one step ahead of any pathogen that may appear off our shores and even be able to predict a pandemic. We are developing new approaches to immunization using DNA and RNA. In particular, we think about how nucleic acid helps in immunization. The idea is that you can tell your cells to produce antibodies with the correct code that will be effective against a particular pathogen. It all comes down toto teach cells to respond to a pathogen - and this will open up for us almost instant immunity against a particular pathogen and the ability to fight it on an equal footing.
Contrasting this with the traditional way of dealing with infectious diseases, which takes months - if not years - including not only identifying the pathogen, but also creating a sufficient quantity of vaccine, this method can be much faster. A radical approach is needed in the creation of this fundamental technology, in the application of DNA and RNA approaches in the fight against infectious diseases. I hope we will have something to announce in 2017.
What, for example, to declare?
We've already had some pretty good results in experiments in mice, which have shown that nucleic acid approaches work well. We're starting to do safe experiments on humans. These are the first steps. In the coming year, we will begin to create new programs for these platforms. We are not in a hurry to make statements, because if we succeed, it will fundamentally change the very principle of combating infectious statements.
Over the past few years, there has been a lot of buzz around mind-controlled prostheses and exoskeletons. How does BTO DARPA fit into this space?
We are pretty much passionate about this area. We recently delivered the first two commercially available Luke dentures, the most advanced dentures in the world. This is a big step in brain-controlled prostheses, but we are not going to stop there.
I think in the future there will be a wide variety of devices that can be controlled by the activity of neurons, and this can be done not only by victims, but also by ordinary people. We would like to call for the use of neural technology in everyday life as early as 2017.
Indeed? What kind of applications could healthy people use in their daily life?
I'm really interested in how neural technology could change how we interact with each other, how we communicate, and even make decisions. I am thinking about cognitive assistance. There are a lot of ideas on how to help a variety of people. The door could just open at the thought of it - and this is just the simplest application of such technologies.
Recently, DARPA conducted a study that was published in the journal Neuron, investigating that deep brain stimulation did not improve memory - and even made it worse. But a previous study from a few years ago had the opposite conclusion: stimulation improved memory. What does this mean for your department's work in this area?
Neurotechnology is a very large area in our office. We have made great advances in the medical field by showing that direct neural interfaces (connections between the brain and a device such as a neurostimulator, computer, or prosthesis) can restore movement, sensation, and health with neuropsychiatric disorders. Remarkably, with all due respect to many studies, many people think that it is possible to isolate an important area of the brain, stimulate it and magically get a response. But this is not the case. When you map what is happening in the brain, it turns out that if you don't send the correct codes to the brain, you will not get an improvement in memory and may even worsen it. But the trick is that if you submit the correct codes, you will get significant improvements in declarative memory. So this is a double-edged sword. More research is needed in the next generation of brain research.
Could you please clarify what you mean by "code"?
Code is a couple of things. This is the precise firing of individual neurons. Let's say you have 100 neurons and they all fire at different times in different places - and all these on and off can be interpreted as trying to remember the word "Nancy" or "tree". We can understand what these activation patterns mean and how they relate to the real world. All of these neural activation circuits together produce brain waves or rhythms, and at this level we also study the brain. It's important to understand all these different brain cells because that's how it works.
Your department also has a “biochronicity” program that explores the role of time in biological functions and attempts to manage the effects of time on human physiology
We lose so much because we don't understand biology. I think our understanding of biology is growing a lot. And our ability to interact with biology using technical methods will change our relationship to the body, brain, and immune system. I think we will have an amazing future. 2017 will blow our brains out.
ILYA KHEL
