Darpa, the military’s out-there research agency, has given $5.3 million to ASU’s Biodesign Institute for the project. And the grant is only one part of a much bigger Darpa initiative, called Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals. Earlier this year, the agency funded programs to produce vaccines using tobacco plants and a prophetic almanac that’d anticipate pathogenic mutations before they happen.

Tobacco-based production would turn a year-long process into a four-week one. But for at-risk troops, Darpa wants something even faster: a vaccine to address any pathogen, developed in seven days and ready for injection shortly after.

“I don’t know if we can pull this off, but I think this basic idea might work,” ASU researcher Dr. Steven Albert Johnson says of his team’s plan. Using thousands of synthetic antibodies, called synbodies, they’ll create an immunity toolkit that can be combined in myriad ways to tackle virtually any pathogen.

“Take the bug, put it on a slide and then find appropriate bindings,” Johnson says. “If somebody gave you a Bug X, and you already had basically a Lego system of pre-made peptides, you find two that will bind and make a high-affinity agent.”

10,000 synbodies would be sufficient to stave off — in theory — any imaginable pathogen. But researchers estimate that around 100 will suffice for Darpa’s needs. Once the synbodies are made, they can be stockpiled and pulled out whenever a new threat emerges.

And if the method does take off, it’d offer a major boost for civilian vaccine production, too. But short of a massive deadly outbreak, we’d likely not get our vaccines quite so fast. For deployed troops, the Pentagon could invoke “emergency protocol” — meaning Darpa’s one-week timeline would skip over clinical trials and FDA approval, which can take up to a decade to complete.

Photo: U.S Air Force

See Also:

• Darpa-funded Researchers: Tobacco vs. Viral Terror
• Army’s Vaccine Plan: Inject Troops With Gas-Propelled, Electro …
• Darpa Turns to Canadian Tobacco to Fight Viral Terror
• Darpa Wants to Predict Deadly Pathogens with ‘Prophecy’
• Pentagon: Stop Biothreats Before They Spread
• Army Researchers Find an Ebola Cure. But it Might Only Save …
• Pentagon to Troop-Killing Superbugs: Resistance Is Futile

Authors: Katie Drummond

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