(Kathleen Miller) The elite Pentagon research unit that helped create the Internet and stealth fighter jets is now taking on diarrhea.The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is dedicated to maintaining the U.S. military’s technology edge, wants to develop a commercially viable medicine that delivers quick, temporary protection for soldiers from a variety of diseases such as the flu, diarrhea and malaria.
Such bugs are the bane of troops sent abroad. Diarrhea struck as many as 60 percent of deployed troops at the start of the Iraq war, said Mark Riddle, a U.S. Navy commander who performs military medical research at the Naval Medical Research Center in Silver Spring, Md. More than 1 million service days were sacrificed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “due to severe diarrhea in deployed forces,” DARPA said in program documents on a federal website.
“There’s a sense of urgency and you’re constantly thinking about where the next latrine is,” said Riddle, who works on a separate military project studying diarrhea. “In that kind of situation you start wondering how well a soldier can perform, target bad guys and do his or her mission.”
The DARPA project seeks to create a system for making drugs based on nucleic acids such as DNA, which contain genetic codes, rather than the proteins, weakened or dead viruses that typically constitute vaccines and can take a long time to manufacture.
Egg technology
If the DARPA effort is successful, the government could provide the first vaccine manufacturing breakthrough in decades, said Art Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center in New York.
“A lot of the way vaccines are made is through viruses growing on chicken eggs, which is basically old technology,” Caplan said.
GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and other companies make flu shots, for example, that must be reformulated and then grown in eggs each year to accommodate the shifting virus, a time-consuming and costly process that has led to shortages.
There’s little incentive for drugmakers to invest in vaccine research because the profits pale in comparison with other drugs and devices, Caplan said.
“Selling a tetanus shot at 20 cents a head is not going to get you the kind of profits that you make with an erectile dysfunction drug that runs 25 bucks a use,” he said.
Quick delivery
DARPA, whose website slogan is “Creating & Preventing Strategic Surprise,” has dedicated resources to drug research in the past. Last year, the agency and the National Institutes of Health pledged a combined $140 million over five years to develop a way to test drug toxicity on chips containing human cells rather than lab rats and other animals. That project intends to boost the speed and accuracy of reviews required to win government approval of new treatments.
Researchers selected for the latest initiative will try to devise a drug that directs people’s own cells to produce antibodies to temporarily protect against a given disease. The method would allow quicker delivery of medicine because, “in effect, the body makes the drug,” said Lt. Col. Daniel Wattendorf, DARPA program manager.
He declined to say how much funding is available for the research or how many companies, universities or nonprofit groups will be selected to participate.
The project faces tough odds, said Tony Butler, an analyst with Barclays.
“There has been no success in using DNA to make a commercially available vaccine,” Butler said.
Merck’s attempts
It’s not for lack of trying, he said. Merck & Co. has studied creating a DNA-based vaccine for flu, and there have been attempts to use DNA to protect against HIV, Butler said.
“These have never panned out in large-scale trials,” he said.
DARPA typically picks projects where the expected success rate is 10 percent or less, said Stephen Albert Johnston, co-director of the Center for Innovations in Medicine at Arizona State University.
“They’re supposed to be the high-risk guys,” Johnston said. “If they get too high of a success rate, they figure they aren’t taking enough risks.”
The research bureau was formed in 1958, after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, beating the United States. The incident “showed that a fundamental change was needed in America’s defense science and technology programs,” according to the DARPA website.