FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Military Is Working on Making Humans as Disease-Resistant as Rats

"Rats host pathogens and they survive just fine—isn't that a great opportunity for us?"
Image: Adrianne Jeffries

Last year, there was a study suggesting that the average rat in New York City carries dozens of pathogens, many of them potentially lethal to humans and many of them completely new to science. Yet rats gleefully gallivant around New York's streets looking no worse for the wear—can humans become more like our rodent relatives?

Unsurprisingly, that rat study went viral (get it?)—and it may have gotten the attention of scientists at DARPA, the Pentagon's advanced research lab. Researchers there say it may be possible to alter humans so that we can host deadly diseases without getting ill ourselves.

Advertisement

"We should look beyond the pathogen—it's really about the host, and the host's responses to infection," Colonel Matthew Hepburn, program manager of DARPA's Biological Technologies Office said at a recent conference. "Rats have all these things and they survive just fine—isn't that a great opportunity for us?"

"Can we make you more mouselike for a short period of time to save your life?"

Hepburn says his office wants to "ditch the term pathogen" and instead attempt to find ways for humans to more-or-less coexist with bacteria, viruses, and parasites that would be harmful or deadly today. In other words, he wants to make it possible for people to carry diseases such as Ebola without actually getting sick.

Like most things DARPA, much of this research is classified, and Hepburn wouldn't go deep into specifics about what he's talking about. But his team is doing genetic analysis of mice, rats, and other animals in an attempt to understand what makes it possible for them to carry disease-causing organisms without getting sick. It seemed as though he was at least interested in the possibility of developing genetic therapies that would bestow some of a rodent's immunity upon a human.

"We're trying to find—what's special about the mice, and can we translate it to humans to modulate the host response to infection in times of critical illness?" he said. "Can we make you more mouselike for a short period of time to save your life?"

Advertisement

Hepburn doesn't believe this kind of thinking is crazy. He says that, already, there are tons of genetic clues to immunity living within the DNA of specific humans.

Every year, thousands of clinical trials are performed on humans to test out new therapies and potential drugs. And in most of those trials, there is a control group that receives a placebo in place of the actual medicine being tested. And yet, in every control group, there are people whose immune systems manage to conquer whatever it is they're fighting.

"What if we reexamine that control group? There are always those people who are outliers, who are resistant to infection," he said. "What if we can discover what makes them special and then predict if that special pattern translates across other infectious diseases?"

Famously, there is a line of Italian people who have a genetic "defect" that prevents them from getting clogged arteries, meaning the family doesn't really have to worry about getting heart attacks or strokes. Researchers have long said that the family may hold the key to solving artery disease—Hepburn seems to believe that a similar genetic immunity could be developed for things like HIV, malaria, Ebola, and so on.

"I want to learn from the animal kingdom," he said, "to stop infectious diseases from killing people. We're going to get there."