Biosecurity

DARPA Wants Smart Suits to Protect Against Biological Attacks

The Pentagon's research arm—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—wants to accelerate the development of innovative textiles and smart materials to better and more comfortably protect humans from chemical and biological threats.

According to a recently published broad agency announcement, DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office launched the Personalized Protective Biosystem, or PPB program to rapidly produce wearable technology that prevents threatening agents from entering the body and cutting-edge barriers that can neutralize damaging agents when they come into contact with people’s skin, eyes and airways.

“The current [chemical and biological] threat environment consists of broadly acting, highly pathogenic, and sometimes immediately lethal threats that are capable of entering the body via multiple pathways, including skin, airway, ocular, and the gastrointestinal tract,” officials wrote in the announcement. “Despite substantial financial investments and advances in the CB Defense enterprise over many decades, current personal protective equipment solutions add logistical, mobility, and thermal challenges to the warfighter/stability operations care provider, which place their missions at risk.”