• DARPA seeks to modify red blood cells to enhance troop performance.
• The Red Blood Cell Factory program aims to insert biologically active components in cells.
• The agency says this research could one day lead to longer-lasting meds and blood-cell drug delivery systems.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the Pentagon's top research arm, wants to know if red blood cells can be modified in novel ways to protect troops and help them manage extreme battlefield environments.

The DARPA program, known as "Red Blood Cell Factory," is looking for researchers and is interested in inserting "biologically active components" or "cargoes" in red blood cells. The hope is that modified cells would bring with them special enhancements, "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 does not expect the researchers to experiment on people or animals, just on bags of blood. The research is 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, for example, 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."

It could also be possible to modify the red blood cells in ways that would 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.

Another potential use of modified cells could be stopping a hemorrhage from trauma, including battlefield wounds.

"Trauma induces a kind of host of biological responses, one of which is rupturing of red blood cells," Bettinger said. DARPA's research efforts could ascertain from its blood research whether a catastrophic injury that would normally mean death from blood loss instead sees blood automatically coagulate.

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 lifetime are partly why red blood cells are such an attractive target for scientists.

Part of the challenge, Mitragotri said, is that the cells can't be so radically changed that the body no longer recognizes them as red blood cells, thus prompting quicker bodily digestion.

Such advances in bioengineering could be a game-changer in fields like infectious disease treatment and oncology, said Mitragotri, illnesses which 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 there's also been research into potential physical enhancements through various lines of effort.

In 2019, for instance, the Army released a "Cyborg Soldier 2050" report detailing how the military is thinking about a future where troops could benefit from things like neural and optical enhancements, though the report acknowledged ethical and legal concerns surrounding such possibilities.

US rivals like China are, as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies noted in a new report, also exploring this space, but with less concern for ethical considerations.

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."