A New DOMANE for the Pandemic Era

(DOMANE recommended Remdesivir for treatment of Covid-19 patients which killed many of them and DTRA made Covid-19 in the first place... and here we are setting up the blame for the NEXT ONE on China)

from DVids

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s (DTRA) Chemical and Biological Technologies Department, in its role as the Joint Science and Technology Office (JSTO), is developing a system-of-systems called DOMANE — Discovery of MCMs (medical countermeasures) Against Novel Entities — an interdisciplinary effort with team members whose expertise include computer science, physics, and medicine. DTRA CB posits that one drug may be insufficient towards countering a threat, so it is developing DOMANE to rapidly identify a combination of drugs to impact the novel biological threat from multiple targets, which may prove effective in promoting a disease-modifying effect to counter the biological threat.

Systems within DOMANE include machine learning, high-throughput screening, in silico predictive tools, cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), organ-on-a-chip, and other emergent technologies. Machine-learning algorithms greatly reduce the time needed to search vast amounts of data on drugs and diseases. DOMANE is possible, in part, because of research studies that have occurred over the past several decades on biological threat agents and MCMs. The studies resulted in the global availability of a large repository of laboratory and clinical data (“big data”) on how biological threats affect the human body.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting national human and economic toll demonstrate a clear and present vulnerability of the U.S. to emerging and unknown contagious infectious diseases. For Joint Forces on the battlefield, the possibility of illness due to emerging biological threats can impact their mission. Ideally, they should be equipped with the MCMs they need to lessen the influence of emerging biological threats.

DOMANE started in (late) 2019, (right) before the current pandemic, with the goal to shorten the traditional, multi-year timeline for developing MCMs to treat novel diseases. Utilizing drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), DOMANE will evaluate the feasibility of repurposing them as MCMs to combat emerging threats. Some of the advantages to using FDA-approved drugs are that they are already manufacturable, have well-known toxicological profiles, and can proceed directly to human efficacy or Animal Rule studies. This can reduce or eliminate the time-intensive animal toxicology and human safety studies and enhance current good manufacturing practice to scale up process and ongoing stability assessment...

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