The Burrill Report


The Pentagon’s main biodefense program is shifting its focus to the rapid detection of germ warfare bugs after spending more than a $1 billion to develop treatments for bioterrorism attacks with modest results, according to report in the Boston Globe.

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks and anthrax mailings, The Department of Defense’s Transformational Medical Technologies program had been tasked with developing new medicines designed to treat people exposed to mutant versions of Ebola, Marburg, and other deadly viruses.

But after pursuing more than 50 projects with more than 100 contractors directed to develop antidotes for bioterrorism agents, just two experimental medicines have shown progress and both are far from ready for clinical tests, according to the Globe.

The program’s new focus will be on making a “cadre of investments that are able to take an unknown sample that may contain different agents, and be able to determine very quickly what is in there,’’ says Alan Rudolph, director of science and technology at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in an interview with the paper.

The Defense Department’s ultimate goal is to develop a “one size fits all” drug capable of treating multiple deadly germs, but bioterrorism experts that spoke with the Globe say that much more research will be needed before such therapeutics become a reality. Getting there will require more basic science work and new market incentives to encourage private companies to expend effort on biodefense applications, they say.


January 20, 2011
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-biodefense_investments_shift_to_detection.html