On October 2, 2013 the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through its “synthetic biology” ADEPT: PROTECT program, awarded Moderna Therapeutics “up to $25 million to research and develop its messenger RNA therapeutics™ platform as a rapid and reliable way to make antibody-producing drugs to protect against a wide range of known and unknown emerging infectious diseases and engineered biological threats.” Much of this funding will be used over the next 5 years to “advance promising antibody- producing drug candidates into preclinical testing and human clinical trials“. [1]
The ADEPT: PROTECT Pandemic Prevention Platform program plans to have the “development and widescale deployment of protective countermeasures” within 60 days from detection of an outbreak.
DARPAs’s Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics: Prophylactic Options to Environmental and Contagious Threats – ADEPT: PROTECT program seeks to “enable adaptable, diagnostic devices that decrease the time required to design, manufacture, and rapidly distribute test panels in response to evolving or emerging diagnostic needs.”Moderna’s mRNA “platform has the potential to speed the development and manufacture of treatments that can produce a safer, more reliable and more robust immune response than existing technologies.”
The ADEPT program began in August 2011 when DARPA began investing in “Controlling Cellular Machinery (CCM) “technologies such as nucleic acid vaccines. The hypothesis was that rather than delivering antigens to the immune system, we could deliver genes that encode the antigen and allow the human body to produce the antigen from its own cells, triggering a protective immune response.”
In January 2014 DARPA created a new division called the Biological Technologies Office (BTO), “to explore the increasingly dynamic intersection of biology and the physical sciences” i.e. synthetic biology, neuro-nanotechnology and AI. [2, 3]
“DARPA pioneered the use of the body as a bioreactor to produce prophylactic antibodies to protect against biothreats”. With “[g]ene-encoded antibodies for near-immediate, temporary protection”. [4] This is different to gene-encoded antigen, which Moderna has claimed in 2020 to be a “vaccine”.