Global research and development company Battelle officially signed onto the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) Epigenetic Characterization and Observation (ECHO) program this week, to develop a quick and mobile means of identifying those touched by weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
DARPA’s research will not only help identify those recently exposed to WMDs but will develop a system capable of detecting — within someone’s epigenome — if an individual has ever in their lives been exposed to materials potentially associated with such weapons.
As part of the process of development, Battelle will examine blood samples from those known to have handled materials associated with a variety of WMD-linked items: biological, chemical, explosive, pesticide, or herbicide contaminants. They will then compare these results against various control subjects who have never handled such items previously. In so doing, they hope to identify unique epigenome signatures for the technology.
“We’ll be developing methods to identify these signatures and how to interpret them for attribution—what did the person handle, when and for how long,” research lead Rachel Spurbeck, Battelle biologist and principal research scientist, said. “This will even allow for diagnosing illnesses in individuals as a result of their exposure.”
Current forensic and diagnostic tests focus solely on the immediate presence of contaminants. ECHO would instead read people’s whole epigenome like a DNA history book, laying out a chronicle of all that has touched them, long after any physical evidence has gone. This is because many items can impact people’s DNA in ways one might consider more subtle — slight modifications of expression, adaptations or survival evolutions.