The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the Pentagon's top research arm, wants to find out if red blood cells could be modified in novel ways to protect troops and help them manage extreme battlefield environments.
The DARPA program, called the Red Blood Cell Factory, is looking for researchers to study the insertion of "biologically active components" or "cargoes" in red blood cells. The hope is that modified cells would enhance certain biological systems, "thus allowing recipients, such as warfighters, to operate more effectively in dangerous or extreme environments."
Red blood cells could act like a truck, carrying "cargo" or special protections, to all parts of the body, since they already circulate oxygen everywhere, Christopher Bettinger, a professor of biomedical engineering overseeing the program, told Business Insider.
"What if we could add in additional cargo … inside of that disc," Bettinger said, referring to the shape of red blood cells, "that could then confer these interesting benefits … protective capabilities that we're trying to sort of imbue to our warfighters?"
What could these modifications do?
DARPA's experiments wouldn't be conducted on people or animals, just on bags of blood. The research would be foundational, Bettinger said, but could allow scientists to identify how red blood cell modification could evolve over time.
The research could impact the way troops battle diseases that reproduce in red blood cells, such as malaria, Bettinger hypothesized.
"Imagine an alternative world where we have a warfighter that has a red blood cell that's accessorized with a compound that can sort of defeat malaria," Bettinger said. In this scenario, a red blood cell could be "accessorized" with a countermeasure.
"It's kind of like an automatic drug-delivery system," he said, "that could then protect the warfighter from the harmful effects of subsequent infection and sort of replication of the parasite."
Modified red blood cells might allow medications to last longer without a service member having to ingest them daily — instead, relying on doses that protect a person for weeks or months instead of just 24 hours, Bettinger said.
Another possibility could be modifying cells to allow them to stop hemorrhaging after a traumatic injury, such as a battlefield wound.
"Trauma induces a kind of host of biological responses, one of which is rupturing of red blood cells," Bettinger said. DARPA's research could try to determine whether enhanced red blood cells would allow blood to automatically coagulate after a catastrophic injury that, under normal circumstances, would likely cause a person to bleed to death.
A path to a more capable warfighter
"Each red blood cell stays in the blood for about four months, and it accesses pretty much every organ in the body," said Samir Mitragotri, a professor of bioengineering at Harvard. Their prevalence and relatively long lifespan are in part why red blood cells are such an attractive target for scientists.
Part of the challenge, Mitragotri said, would be ensuring cells aren't changed so much that the body no longer recognized them as red blood cells, prompting quicker bodily digestion.
Such advances in bioengineering could be a game-changer in fields like infectious disease treatment and oncology, Mitragotri said, illnesses that require long periods of drug treatment. Though the science is still emerging, it's "a very promising area," he said.
The Department of Defense has long been interested in learning how biomedical engineering could benefit troops.
For years, the US military has been looking into the benefits of biofeedback technologies to better understand mental and physical health. And the military has imagined other potential physical enhancements for soldiers.
In 2019, the Army released a report called "Cyborg Soldier 2050," which laid out a vision of the future where troops would benefit from neural and optical enhancements, though the report acknowledged ethical and legal concerns around implementing them.
US rivals, including China, are also exploring these ideas, but with fewer ethical considerations, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies noted in a new report.
The Chinese People's Liberation Army "has long recognized the strategic importance of biotechnology, engaging in extensive collaborations with Chinese biotechnology behemoths," the report said. "These and other partnerships have yielded research with potential military applications, including efforts to enhance Chinese soldiers' physical and cognitive abilities."
