Biotechnology for Near Real-Time Predictive Toxicology for Warfighter Protection

Abstract : An increasingly important issue in force protection is the toxicology associated with toxic chemical and mixture exposure at uncharacterized deployed sites. Current methods for determining or monitoring toxic exposures to the warfighter in their working or living environment are not adequate to prevent serious health effects. Deployed personnel may be exposed to toxic chemicals as a result of industrial accidents, intentional or unintentional activities of enemy or friendly forces or sabotage. Rapid risk assessment of these scenarios requires the development of new testing methods. In order to prevent serious injury to the deployed warfighter exposed to toxic substances and to minimize mission degradation due to environmentally related adverse health effects, novel human monitoring methodologies that provide near real-time detection of potential toxic injury must be developed. It is necessary to devise methodologies that will predict or identify exposure of personnel to low concentrations of harmful substances before they cause harm to an individual. It is also important to identify methodologies that are relatively non-invasive, which could include collection of urine, blood, saliva or epithelial cells from humans. Emerging biotechnologies, such as toxicogenomics, proteomics and metabonomics will be investigated for their effectiveness to identify toxic effects upon the warfighter before they can induce a reduction in health and/or operational performance or before they can induce a disease process that would not manifest for several years.