Biosecurity

DARPA INTERCEPT Program for Biodefense Countermeasures

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) is hosting a Proposers Day in advance of a planned Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for the INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program.

The goal of the INTERCEPT program is to explore and develop a new therapeutic platform to outpace fast-evolving viral pathogens, based upon virus-based therapeutic particles that interfere with viral infection and co-evolve with viral targets.

Current preventive and therapeutic platforms including vaccines and anti-virals are designed to treat viral pathogens in their circulating state or at the time of diagnosis. However, pathogens mutate and evolve over time, becoming resistant to static therapies.

The INTERCEPT program builds upon previously reported naturally occurring Defective Interfering Particles (DIPs), viral-derived particles with partially deleted genomes that lack essential genes for replication enzymes and capsid proteins. DIPs rely on the wildtype parent virus to replicate and mobilize, and consume critical wildtype resources, thus interfering with the infection process.