Peter Graham
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will host a Proposers Day on Dec. 14 in Arlington, Va., to meet vendors that can help develop technologies that aid in body resilience and recovery of military service members during warfighting missions.
Through the Panacea program, DARPA wants to invent, design and test multitarget drugs that can help soldiers maintain their individual physiological stability even as they undergo stressful activities such as deep-sea diving and long-distance hiking under severe climates, the agency said Wednesday.
The program is designed to produce drugs that would be able to simultaneously target multiple proteins in a bid to cast network-level effects in the body, according to DARPA.
The endeavor also seeks to gain more knowledge about the proteome – which is the complete set of proteins – and how it affects signaling networks in the body.
Tristan McClure-Begley, Panacea’s program manager, said the Food and Drug Administration’s roster of approved pharmaceutical drugs targets only around 549 proteins, even though the body can make over six million different protein types.
DARPA asks the research community to take note of the following when submitting initial proofs of concept: metabolic stress during missions or inflammation after injury; molecular mechanisms contributing to those circumstances; and medicinal chemistry approaches to modulate said conditions.
