DARPA goes fundamental to find game-changing battlefield anesthetics

DARPA has announced its new Anesthetics for Battlefield Care (ABC) program, which is aiming to develop a new combat anesthesia that can be applied to casualties in the field without requiring specialized medical training or complex monitoring apparatus.

Like so many things, we take anesthetics so much for granted that we find it hard to imagine a time when they didn't exist. Since they were first developed in the 1840s, anesthetics and their supporting technologies have made great life-saving advances, but not in the realm of battlefield anesthetics, which are still not much better than a shot of morphine.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that anesthetics aren't simple painkillers. They are a complex cocktail of medicines designed to perform a number of functions, including calming the patient, reducing sensations, keeping the patient from moving, or inducing unconsciousness. In addition, administering anesthetics requires an expert who monitors the patient and provides support in the form of various gasses and other mechanisms to stabilize respiration, keeping oxygen levels in the green zone, and maintaining heart function.

The other reason is that, for all the hundreds of millions of times anesthetics have been used, nobody really understands how they work. Doctors know how to use anesthetics, but they don't know the mechanism behind them.

What DARPA is striving for with ABC is to solicit ideas on how to create a simpler, easy-to-apply battlefield anesthetic by looking at the problem from a fundamental level. The new approach involve studying the mechanism of anesthetics from the anatomical to the molecular level to sort out the "why" and develop a way to remove pain and allow for live-saving treatments as close as possible to the point of injury on the battlefield without the need for hospital-level equipment and specialists or dangerous physiological side effects.

"Anesthetics for Battlefield Care is de-risking a problem that while targeted to the US Department of Defense, will be disruptive to all of medicine," says Michael Feasel, ABC program manager. "It could benefit first response from rural emergency services, to air medical services, all the way to level I trauma centers. This program seeks to support life-saving interventions to be employed earlier, closer to the point of injury, enabling better outcomes for all patients, whether warfighter or civilian."

Source: DARPA