| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
DARPA’s Bio-Revolution: GM Blood Cells Injected in Soldiers to Combat BioWeapons?
GM blood cells to protect tomorrow’s soldiers from bioweapons?
Blood transfusions containing genetically engineered cells could be the future of countering germ warfare, according to new research sponsored by DARPA, which hopes modified blood cells could help neutralize biological toxins deployed against soldiers.
In their research, scientists from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts were supported by the US Defence Research Projects Agency – renowned for being the scientific funding branch of the US military. The researchers involved said that the US was very interested in deploying the discovery against any biological weapons threats.
“We wanted to create high-value red cells that do more than simply carry oxygen,” says Whitehead Founding Member Harvey Lodish, in a statement published on the Whitehead Institute website. Lodish collaborated with Whitehead Member Hidde Ploegh in the project.
The breakthrough study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which harvests Lodish’s expertise in red blood cells (RBCs) with biochemical methods developed in Ploegh’s lab. Referred to as “sortagging,” the approach uses “bacterial enzyme sortase A” to bond between the surface protein and a substance of choice, “be it a small-molecule therapeutic or an antibody capable of binding a toxin.” Such modifications leave the cells unharmed.
“Here we’ve laid out the technology to make mouse and human red blood cells in culture that can express what we want and potentially be used for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes,” Lodish said.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2014/07/darpas-bio-revolution-gm-blood-cells-injected-in-soldiers-to-combat-bioweapons/
