Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics (ADEPT)*
Abstract
*Previously funded in Synthetic Biology in PE 0601101E, Project TRS-01 The Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics (ADEPT) program will develop the underlying technologies to rapidly respond to a disease or threat, and improve individual readiness and total force health protection by providing centralized laboratory capabilities at non-tertiary care and individual settings. ADEPT will develop and exploit synthetic biology for the in vivo creation of nucleic acid circuits that continuously and autonomously sense and respond to changes in physiologic state and for novel methods to target delivery, enhance immunogenicity, or control activity of vaccines, potentially eliminating the time to manufacture a vaccine ex vivo. ADEPT advancements to control cellular machinery include research to optimize orthogonality and modularity of genetic control elements; identify methods to increase sensitivity and specificity; and demonstrate methods to control cellular machinery in response to changes in physiological status. ADEPT will develop methodologies for measuring health-specific biomarkers from a collected biospecimen to enable diagnostics at the point-of-need or resource limited clinical facilities (point-of-care), in-garrison or deployed. Additionally, ADEPT will initiate techniques to characterize natural signal transduction pathways, such as electrical and mechanical, that are not conventionally used to guide diagnosis, or as a therapeutic measure. The signals will be studied in detail and their physiological function validated for measurement and modulation to determine diagnostic and therapeutic benefit. Applied research efforts are budgeted in PE 0602115E, Project BT-01.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2013
- Source ID
- f60d13fe49d3c0e4f5c4046d2ee93beb