Back in July, when the Syrian regime announced that it might be willing to use its load of chemical weapons, it set off alarm bells around the planet. The only way to safeguard people against a Syrian nerve gas attack would be with heavy protective gear ' and there's not nearly enough to go around.
The Pentagon's extreme science branch believes there may be a way to ward off nerve gas attacks before they're ever launched. The answer lies in a close cousin of tobacco. Earlier this month, Darpa gave out a $2.7 million contract to Kentucky Bioprocessing, LLC to get going on this potential pre-treatment, which could be given to troops prior to a deployment into a war zone with a credible threat of chemical weapon use.
When nerve agents enter the human body, they stop certain enzymes from working. Specifically, they stop the ones that break down the nerve signaling molecule, acetylcholine. When acetylcholine concentrations get too high, the whole nervous system essentially overburdens itself.
Symptoms include diarrhea, nausea, irregular heart rates, convulsions, and death. At the moment we don't have a way of preventing this from happening. We can only lessen and treat the effects once the damage has been done.
However, back in mid February, Darpa announced that it was looking to provide financial assistance to a company that could extract an enzyme called butyrylcholinesterase (rBuChE) from a plant closely related to tobacco, called Nicotiana benthamiana.
The rBuChE protein is also found within the human liver and is thought to be what is colloquially known as a 'bioscavenger.' The rBuChE flows through the blood stream, just waiting to happen upon a hostile agent ' or so goes the theory. Should it come into contact with a nerve agent molecule, it will bind to it and break it down into sub-particles, hence preventing it from wreaking havoc on the nervous system.
The aim of the Darpa-funded project, as stated in the grant proposal, is to produce significant amounts of rBuChE from the Nicotiana benthamiana plant, enough to be able to create 'a drug that can protect the warfighter from chemical threat agent exposures.' The hope is that the rBuChE harvested from the plant will act just as if the liver had synthesized it.
Assuming that the good people at Kentucky Bioprocessing, LLC are successful in extracting the enzyme from Nicotiana benthamiana, the next stage will be to figure out a way of practically administrating it to what might presumably be a large number of soldiers. Darpa suggests the consideration of two techniques: injection and intravenous application ' an obvious preference towards a vaccine, given the impracticalities of placing a large number of people on an IV drip.
It sounds hard to believe, but within a few years we might see Virginian farmers switching their crop from conventional cigarette tobacco so they can harvest the answer to America's future geo-political woes.
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