The Defense Department's deep research and development arm is exploring ways to hack U.S. service members' blood so they can fight harder and longer in what could represent a major step toward engineering troops with seemingly superhuman capabilities.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Red Blood Cell-Factory program, unveiled in December, is developing a medical device that could feed "biologically active components" into U.S. troops' red blood cells. Those doses, when triggered, could help them overcome injury or illness on the battlefield.
That could help troops operate in the harshest environments, from extreme cold to disease-ridden jungles to even subterranean environments, according to RBC-Factory program manager Dr. Chris Bettinger.
"This is all about reimagining how we can protect service members," Bettinger tells Military.com. "We want to answer the question: To what extent can we endow red blood cells with compounds in a stable way, and have those red blood cells serve as a durable, circulating project to contain and release that compound?"
As Bettinger explains it, red blood cells are an ideal delivery vehicle for biological compounds like peptides and proteins because they can circulate reliably in the human bloodstream for months. In practical terms, DARPA envisions using a pre-deployment regimen to customize some of a service member's red blood cells to deal with threats specific to where they're headed, not unlike the military health system's area of operations-specific vaccination recommendations.
"We could empower them with new compounds to energize and animate them to do new things," Bettinger says.
Biological interventions for military personnel have been a fixture of modern warfare for well over a century since cocaine hit the front lines of World War I. Today, some American service members are still exposed to performance-enhancing drugs, whether they're authorized "go" and "no-go" pills for military aviators or illicit steroids for special operations forces. In recent years, the Defense Department has even explored technological augmentation, from powered exoskeletons to brain implants, to potentially enhance troop performance. A 2019 Army report looking at the future of the "cyborg soldier" suggested that the "introduction of augmented human beings into the general population, DoD active-duty personnel, and near-peer competitors will accelerate in the years following 2050."
But with the rise of gene editing and other advancements in medical technology, the U.S. military may now be in the middle of a bioengineering arms race with those near-peer competitors, Russia and China, in pursuit of physiological enhancements that might give troops an edge on a chaotic battlefield.
The RBC-Factory program is one of several recent initiatives explicitly focused on building biological resilience. Established in 2018, the agency's PReemptive Expression of Protective Alleles and Response Elements (PREPARE) program is tasked with developing a gene editing system to allow the on-demand activation of the body's innate physiological defenses. In 2023, the agency announced its Synthetic Hemo-technologIEs that Locate & Disinfect (SHIELD) program to develop preventative treatments to protect troops against the fungal and bacterial pathogens that can cause bloodstream infections following trauma like a gunshot wound or blast exposure.
The general conceit of the the RBC-Factory program -- introducing a specially engineered substance into an average service member's body to boost their performance on the battlefield -- may sound similar to the process that transformed fictional Army recruit Steve Rogers into the super-soldier Captain America (or, well, the real world example of juicing.) But Bettinger's description of the RBC-Factory's potential applications is more reminiscent of a different fictional character, Wolverine from the mutant X-Men: The compounds delivered through modified red blood cells could help troops heal faster and better resist disease rather than, say, run a two-minute mile or do backflips off of hostile aircraft.
"Imagine a world where service members have red blood cells accessorized with a compound that prevents bleeding," Bettinger says. "What happens after trauma is that you have a rupturing of red blood cells in the body's vasculature. But in this scenario, you have someone prophylactically protected against bleeding, so if they do sustain a trauma, the red blood cells dump out the compound that promotes coagulation and prevents bleeding."
Bettinger points to malaria, a scourge to American service members deployed overseas to tropical environs, as another example of a potential problem the RBC-Factory program can combat. By infusing troops with red blood cells containing an antimalarial peptide, the system could help prevent an infected service member from ever feeling sick.
"In early stages of malarial infection, the red blood cells deliver a medical countermeasure on demand to restore baseline function," he says.
For now, Bettinger is quick to emphasize that the project is focused on troop protection and restoration rather than outright physiological enhancement, noting that DARPA is intentionally eschewing genetic manipulation as it looks at potential solutions.
"We're not talking about augmenting anything," he says. "It's about force protection."
A blood-borne compound delivery system could also have ramifications beyond just preventative treatments, offering a source of physiological protection in tactical scenarios where traditional medical interventions may not be available.
"You can't stockpile enough of the vaccine or antivirus capability to protect the population against that in the future," as then-DARPA director Steven H. Walker put it in 2019. "But that is why you want to be able to actually have your body be the antibody factory, if possible."
As with many early-stage DARPA efforts, the RBC-Factory program is currently focused on "fundamental research" designed to simply map the contours of what's possible in terms of introducing blood-borne compounds into a service member's body. At the moment, the two-year program is in the source selection phase, with officials reviewing proposals and identifying potential performers to deliver prototypes for assessment.
Just as with discussions of performance-enhancing drugs and other biological interventions, the program comes with a slew of thorny ethical and legal challenges for Bettinger and his team to unpack. Do service members have to consent to any type of treatment, or must they simply acquiesce to orders? Can they refuse such treatments on ethical grounds? What are the long-term health effects, and how can service members make an informed decision regarding their treatment if those effects are still unknown? And if adverse effects emerge years later, who bears responsibility for a service member's care and compensation?
DARPA says it's laser-focused on exploring the ethical, legal and social ramifications of red blood cell modifications before proceeding too far down a research path.
"We try to think deeply about the impact of our research," Bettinger says before inadvertently paraphrasing "Jurassic Park": "We step back, take a deep breath, and try not to get so obsessed with whether we can do something, but if we should do something."
