THE DARK WINTER SCENARIO AND BIOTERRORISM
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
OCTOBER 25, 2001
Senator Collins: 'Colonel Larsen, what is being done now in the field of genetics and what investments are being made by DOD/medical communities today toward this end?'
Larsen: "DARPA is developing a variety of therapeutic countermeasures using state-of-the-art techniques in genetic engineering. The objective of their efforts is to develop a suite of medical countermeasures against broad classes of biological pathogens (bacterial, viral, bioengineered, etc.) that share common mechanisms of pathogenesis. Some of the specific project objectives include the following:
Develop novel genomic countermeasures that target multiple biological warfare pathogens using optimized small molecule drugs to bind with high affinity to critical A-T rich DNA sequences within the pathogen genome.
*Develop a new class of small molecule antibiotics effective against multiple biological warfare agents using RNA-based drug design.*
Develop broad-spectrum small molecule inhibitors against the essential bacterial cell division protein FtsZ."
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