When troops are wounded, time is precious. That’s why the fast-ticking minutes that follow such an event are called the “golden hour.” Get the right care within the right time and you survive. Wrong care or an evac takes too long — you’re dead.
Researchers
at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently launched a five-year
project dubbed “Biostasis.” The program will “leverage molecular biology to
develop innovative ways of controlling the speed at which living systems
operate.”
By
doing that they hope to extend the “golden hour” before it’s too late.
“At
the molecular level, life is a set of continuous biochemical reactions, and a
defining characteristic of these reactions is that they need a catalyst to
occur at all,” said Tristan McClure-Begley, the Biostasis program manager.
Those
catalysts, McClure-Begley said, are proteins and “large molecular machines”
that transform chemical and kinetic energy into biological processes.
“Our
goal with Biostasis is to control those molecular machines and get them to all
slow their roll at about the same rate so that we can slow down the entire
system gracefully and avoid adverse consequences when the intervention is
reversed or wears off.”
The
program starts small, first by aiming at slowing certain processes within
cells, then slowing whole cells and later tissue processes, then onto the
entire organism, he said.
But
the goal isn’t simply to slow processes down but to do it without damaging the
processes when they return to normal speed.
