Infectious Disease

From programmable microbes to human-machine symbiosis, biological technologies are expanding our definition of technology and redefining how we interact with and use biology.

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.

The Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is on the move. Spread among humans by mosquitoes, and spread across geographic boundaries by humans who travel, the virus—which causes a debilitating illness—is now expanding through the Western Hemisphere. Governments and health organizations could take proactive steps to limit its spread if they had accurate forecasts of where and when it would appear. DARPA’s CHIKV Challenge asks teams to create models to deliver such forecasts for all of the countries and territories in the Americas and the Caribbean over a six-month period starting in September 2014.

The body’s peripheral nervous system constantly monitors the status of internal organs and helps regulate biological responses to infection, injury or other imbalances. When this regulatory process goes awry due to injury or illness, peripheral nerve signals can actually exacerbate a condition, causing pain, inflammation or immune dysfunction.

Sepsis—a life-threatening over-reaction by the immune system to infection—afflicts 18 million people a year worldwide and kills between 30 and 50 percent of them. Sepsis poses a significant threat to warfighters who suffer combat injuries that predispose them to infection. Antibiotics can kill sepsis-inducing microbes but their overuse is contributing to the threat of drug-resistant microbes and they don’t neutralize the toxins that some pathogens leave behind. Commercial dialysis equipment can remove toxins from the blood but is not built for routine use in theater.