The Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, Darpa, released its budget for the next fiscal year recently, revealing a dizzying range of plans for futuristic military science and tech. Perhaps the most dizzying stuff off all: the agency's efforts to heal wounded troops from even the most serious injuries.
From enhanced new-age vision technologies to a machine that filters all your blood, here are five of Darpa's most-ambitious military medicine projects.
Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics
The ADEPT program aims to create devices that will diagnose and prevent known and unknown disease threats and treat them on-site, in emergency conditions. By enabling a rapid response to emerging hazards, the program aims to strengthen the overall health of the armed forces.
Darpa researchers will try to build quick-and-dirty portable machines that can measure specific markers of disease in the blood. They'll also work on developing unique molecular techniques by which they can quickly spot and analyze newly evolved markers.
Other uses for the $25 million invested in the project include finding new methods to prepare and store patient samples (like blood, urine or semen) for field diagnosis and fresh ways to urgently extract chemicals from the blood for analysis.
Scaffold-Free Tissue Engineering
Collagen "scaffolds" are used today to provide a structure for regrown human tissue. But these scaffolds can degrade -- or get attacked by the body's patrolling immune cells. So Darpa is looking to use magnetism and electrical fields to build human muscles and tissues, with the Scaffold-Free Tissue Engineering project.
Researchers will aim to attach magnetic tags to cells, so cellular materials stay arranged in a specific biological pattern until they can generate natural scaffolds. The final goal in is to create 3-D models of skeletal muscles in space, which show blood-vessel and neuron growth within the artificial tissue.
The project is part of an ongoing effort to push the limits of regenerative tissue medicine by Darpa. By the end of 2012, $8.5 million will be pumped into the new program.
Dialysis-Like Therapeutics
Dialysis-Like Therapeutics is a gruesomely imaginative project that wants to cleanse sick soldiers' blood of all their bacterial contaminants. Bacterial infections can cause a condition known as "sepsis," where the blood is poisoned by toxins, causing a high fever and the inflammation of vital organs. This disease is a common killer of wounded soldiers.
The idea behind the $10 million project is to build an external machine that sucks out the patient’s infected blood and filters it, like a kidney dialysis machine does. The blood-machine will be built to collect 5 liters of human blood at a time, and identify toxic targets.
The plans for 2012 are to develop unique pathogen sensors that can continuously catch bacterial and viral poisons and use specific separation methods to filter them out. The low-resistance fluid system will eventually route the bug-free blood back into the soldier's body.
Neovision2
The Neovision2 project is Darpa's $43.5 million attempt to give animal abilities to artificial eyes. The program has already designed a vision system that is capable of mimicking the visual pathway in mammals.
The final goal is to upgrade to human-style processing, creating a small, portable pair of eyes that will integrate sensory signals to create images of distant objects. The technology uses mathematics and signal-processing pathways from various areas of the brain to create an intelligent sensor that recognizes specific items.
By 2012, Darpa wants to have a fully integrated commercial product that can absorb visual signals, and then process and spit out recognizable images in dangerous military environments.
Tactical Biomedical Technologies
Tactical Biomedical Technologies is an all-encompassing term for a project with a highly specific aim: to provide emergency medical attention to bleeding soldiers at war. Hemorrhaging caused by land mines and explosives is the leading cause of death for soldiers in the field.
The only way the military currently treats internal bleeding is by emergency invasive surgery by medical experts. This project is trying to meet the need for quick-fix technologies that can be used by amateurs to stanch and clot bleeding either on the surface or deep within organs and tissues.
Research in 2010 identified and tested chemicals that clot blood, also known as "hemostatic agents." It also screened for possible biological tags on wounds and organs that could be used as targets for the healing technologies.
By 2012, Darpa hopes to create an FDA-approved material that can be delivered into body cavities where it will bind to specific tissues. For a total cost of approximately $98 million since 2007, the "pharmacy-on-demand" technologies hope to save millions of lives.
Photo: Wikimedia
See Also:
