The Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Association (DARPA) established a program to deliver powerful new defenses against public health and national security threats.
The program — called the PReemptive Expression of Protective Alleles and Response Elements (PREPARE) – develops new medical interventions that temporarily and reversibly modulate the expression of protective genes to guard against acute threats from influenza and ionizing radiation.
DARPA selected five teams to develop these new medical interventions.
“Researchers working within the PREPARE program seek to improve rates of survival and recovery in catastrophic scenarios for which reliable and scalable countermeasures don’t currently exist,” Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, the PREPARE program manager, said.
The program builds off the idea that the human body has innate defenses against many types of health threats, but it does not always activate these defenses quickly enough to block the worst damage. PREPARE technologies would provide a programmable capability to regulate gene expression on demand with timely, scalable defenses that are proportional to anticipated threats.
For example, influenza is a perennial health threat despite the development of vaccines that help protect against predicted strains of circulating virus. The challenge of developing a new vaccine every year makes alternative protective strategies desirable.
The PREPARE teams are working on approaches to influenza defense and treatment that use programmable gene modulators to boost the human body’s natural defenses against influenza while neutralizing the viral genomes, thus weakening the ability of the virus to cause harm. If successful, this would potentially protect against virtually all influenza strains and would provide near instantaneous immunity, as opposed to traditional vaccines. Additionally, the teams are working on ways to make it simple to deliver, through intranasal sprays, perhaps.
Teams from Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and the University of California, San Francisco, are assisting DARPA on the project.
“PREPARE reflects DARPA’s ‘safety first’ approach to genome editing,” Wegrzyn said. “We’re developing tools that deliver the health and safety benefits of modulating genetic expression without the risks of permanent edits to the genome and the potential off-target effects they entail.”