What if it's transcriptomic or epigenomic: the way those genes are expressed?.Is it a genomic factor? Something in a resilient individual's genes that codes for resistance or somehow makes that individual less susceptible to invasion?.Wouldn't it be great to wave a device (perhaps a medical tricorder) over an animal and find out whether it's got host tolerance? Then you could start figuring out where host tolerance comes from in the first place.ĭARPA's announcement makes some interesting suppositions they expect anyone who steps up to be prepared to investigate a bunch of different (and completely fascinating) avenues that may overlap or interconnect in weird ways: This program is organized into three Technical Areas (TAs): 1) Identification and characterization of animal hosts with tolerant phenotypes 2) Discovery of biological mechanisms that underlie tolerance and 3) Identification of interventions that utilize tolerance mechanisms with the goal of reducing morbidity and mortality due to infection.ĭARPA wants to be able to figure out how to identify individual animals that have host tolerance so they can do it reliably, which makes sense. Specifically, DARPA aims to discover the fundamental biological relationships that underlie host tolerance to infection in animal populations in order to provide the foundational knowledge required to develop interventions for potential transition into clinical use. THoR is seeking novel methods and technologies to discover and understand these responses in hosts that are resilient when exposed to infectious diseases. This program strives to discover host tolerance mechanisms in order to identify a suite of interventions suitable for use in humans to mitigate the deleterious effects of infectious diseases. Here's how the THoR announcement summarizes what they're after: DARPA calls their initiative THoR (“Technologies for Host Resilience”) and you can get a look at the announcement and call for proposals at the Federal Business Opportunities website, which is a fascinating rabbit hole all on its own. This is what's known as "host tolerance" or "host resilience," and it's something the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Biological Technologies Office wants to look at. It's not that they're completely immune to the pathogen there's something in their bodies that enables them to keep the pathogen's numbers down and fight it off better than others.
Whenever a disease strikes a population, there are always a few rare individuals who don't get sick. Is that something we ought to aspire to? Probably not, or at least not entirely.
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