Disease limits soldier readiness and creates healthcare costs and logistics burdens. Diagnosing and treating disease faster can help limit its impact. Current technologies and products for diagnosing disease are principally relegated to in vitro (in the lab) medical devices, which are often expensive, bulky and fragile.
Disease limits soldier readiness and creates healthcare costs and logistics burdens. Diagnosing and treating disease faster can help limit its impact. Current technologies and products for diagnosing disease are principally relegated to in vitro (in the lab) medical devices, which are often expensive, bulky and fragile.
DARPA’s In Vivo Nanoplatforms (IVN) program seeks to develop new classes of adaptable nanoparticles for persistent, distributed, unobtrusive physiologic and environmental sensing as well as the treatment of physiologic abnormalities, illness and infectious disease.
The IVN Diagnostics (IVN:Dx) program effort aims to develop a generalized in vivo platform that provides continuous physiological monitoring for the warfighter. Specifically, IVN:Dx will investigate technologies that may provide:
- Implantable nanoplatforms using bio-compatible and nontoxic materials
- In vivo sensing of small and large molecules of biological interest
- Multiplexed detection of analytes at clinically relevant concentrations
- External interrogation of the nanoplatform free from any implanted communications electronics
- Complete system demonstration in a large animal
The IVN Therapeutics (IVN:Tx) program effort will seek unobtrusive nanoplatforms for rapidly treating disease in warfighters.
The IVN:Dx BAA was released in March, 2012. A solicitation for developing IVN:Tx technologies is expected to be released in Fall, 2012.