Rapid Threat Assessment Could Mitigate Danger from Chemical and Biological Warfare: For more than fifty years, researchers have been studying exactly how aspirin affects the human body. Despite thousands of publications on the topic, our understanding is still incomplete.
Meanwhile, novel chemical and biological weapons have historically been mass produced within a year of discovery. Using current methods and technologies, researchers would require decades of study to gain a robust understanding of how new threat agents exert effects on human biological systems.
That capability gap leaves U.S. forces vulnerable, so DARPA's new five-year program, Rapid Threat Assessment (RTA), sets an aggressive new goal for researchers: develop methods and technologies that can, within 30 days of exposure, map the complete molecular mechanism through which a threat agent alters biochemical processes in human cells.
The developed technologies must identify the cellular components and mechanistic events that take place over a range of times, from the milliseconds immediately following exposure to the threat agent, to the days over which alterations in gene and protein expression might occur.
