Many medications and treatments, even after years of research, fail in the final phase of review — when they're actually tested in humans. Despite having performed well in the lab, in mice, and perhaps in closer human analogues like monkeys, drugs occasionally turn out to be ineffective or toxic when used by the humans they're meant to help. To improve this process, and limit the risks to human testers, the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are together pledging up to up to $132 million for creating "organ-on-a-chip" systems, with the eventual goal of simulating the entire human body.

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The tissue-chip project is a natural outgrowth (so to speak) of existing lab testing on human tissue. Each of the projects being funded is aimed at isolating a small, living piece of a human being. It may be just a few cells, but those cells would grow and function as if they were in their native habitat, the human body. And surrounding those cells would be sensors for detecting microscopic changes in the test environment.

Each type of cell and organ must be approached differently: Brain cells exist in an environment vastly different from muscles or the liver. Consequently, the funding is spread over a number of institutions and programs, some of which are specializing in just one type of tissue or organ.

Vanderbilt University, for instance, will be receiving up to $2.1 million from the NIH's $70 million allocation, for the creation of what they call a "microbrain reactor." It would put human brain cells into an artificial environment that not only keeps them alive, but simulates the physiological barriers that protect the brain from contaminants in blood and other fluids. John Wikswo, who is leading Vanderbilt's effort, is enthusiastic about the research:

"Given the differences in cellular biology in the brains of rodents and humans, development of a brain model that contains neurons and all three barriers between blood, brain and cerebral spinal fluid, using entirely human cells, will represent a fundamental advance in and of itself."

Much more information on the project and its multidisciplinary lineup of researchers can be found in Vanderbilt's news release.

Other institutions are undertaking much larger efforts. Harvard University has received a similar amount from the NIH, but Harvard's Wyss Institute could also get more than 10 times as much — up to $37 million — from DARPA to develop a device that integrates as many as 10 organs on a chip. It would be a closer and more complete representation of the human body than has ever been created — a veritable homunculus that could open the way to cheaper, quicker and safer drug testing. It would also reduce the number and variety of animals used in testing, and enable widespread, standardized techniques requiring less training.

This video of experts explaining the Wyss Institute's lung on a chip gives a more specific idea of the context and purpose of this technology:

Another double-barreled dose of funding is heading toward the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT and the Draper Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, are set to receive up to $6.25 million from NIH to model cancer thereapies using engineered human tissue constructs. Up to $26.3 million more will be provided under an agreement with DARPA to create an "organ-on-a-chip" platform, through a new program called BIO-MIMETICS. (That's not only a word in itself, but also a mouthful of an acronym standing for "Barrier-Immune-Organ: Microphysiology, Microenvironment Engineered Construct Systems.")

If everything goes as planned, the MIT-led work with human tissue would be adapted for the BIO-MIMETICS platform. MIT's news release provides more details.

The NIH, DARPA, and the Food and Drug Administration are working in concert, but their funding is separate. (The description of DARPA's proposal is here). In addition to the grants given to Vanderbilt, Harvard and MIT, the NIH has awarded funding to 14 other projects, adding up to a potential total of $70 million over five years.

The FDA isn't kicking in any money for the researchers right now, but the fact sheet for the initiative says the FDA "will help explore how this new technology might be used to assess drug safety prior to approval for first-in-human studies."

You'll find more details about all 17 projects via the NIH's webpage on the Tissue Chip Project Awards. Here's a brief rundown on the projects and their principal researchers.

Ten awards are aimed at investigating or creating systems by which organs are simulated on an extremely small scale. The terminology differs but they are largely working in the same sphere. We've already touched on the funding going to Vanderbilt, Harvard and MIT. Here are the other seven projects:

• Microphysiological systems and low-cost microfluidic platform with analytics (Cornell University - Michael Shuler and James Hickman)

• Circulatory system and integrated muscle tissue for drug and tissue toxicity (Duke University - George Truskey)

• Human induced pluripotent stem cell and embryonic stem cell-based models for predictive neural toxicity and teratogenicity (University of Wisconsin, Madison - James Thomson)

• Disease-specific integrated microphysiological human tissue models (UC Berkeley - Kevin Healy and Luke Lee)

• An integrated in vitro model of perfused tumor and cardiac tissue (UC Irvine - Steven George)

• A 3-D biomimetic liver sinusoid construct for predicting physiology and toxicity (University of Pittsburgh - D. Lansing Taylor and Martin Yarmush)

• A tissue-engineered human kidney microphysiological system (University of Washington - Jonathan Himmelfarb)

Seven awards are for exploring stem/progenitor cells as sources for the tissues to be used in such microsystems:

• Generating human intestinal organoids with an enteric nervous system (Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center - James Wells)

• Modeling complex disease using induced pluripotent stem cell-derived skin constructs (Columbia University Health Sciences - Angela Christiano)

• Human intestinal organoids: Pre-clinical models of non-inflammatory diarrhea (Johns Hopkins University - Mark Donowitz)

• A 3-D model of human brain development for studying gene/environment interactions (Johns Hopkins University - Thomas Hartung)

• Modeling oxidative stress and DNA damage using a gastrointestinal organotypic culture system (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia - John Lynch)

• Three-dimensional osteochondral micro-tissue to model pathogenesis of osteoarthritis (University of Pittsburgh - Rocky Tuan)

• Three-dimensional human lung model to study lung disease and formation of fibrosis (University of Texas - Joan Nichols)
  

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Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News. His personal website is coldewey.cc.

The Pentagon's think tank has selected the group that will manage its "100 Year Starship" project to explore what it would take for a multigenerational mission beyond the solar system, and sources say the leader will be Mae Jemison, who became the first black woman in space in 1992.

In the 20 years since then, Jemison has founded several ventures — including The Jemison Group, a technology design and consulting company; and the Houston-based Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, which takes on educational projects. Jemison, a 55-year-old Alabama native who has experience as a physician and a Peace Corps worker as well as an astronaut, played a prominent role in facilitating the 100 Year Starship symposium organized by NASA and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Florida last fall.

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One of the follow-ups from that seminar was to be the award of a $500,000 contract from DARPA to continue study of the technological, political and social requirements for ultra-long-term projects such as interstellar space missions. Several ventures put in proposals, and one of the groups that didn't win the contract, the Tau Zero Foundation, said in this week's email update that the contract was going to a team "led by an ex-astronaut."

The BBC identified the ex-astronaut as Jemison, based on the text of an unreleased letter from DARPA. It also reported that Jemison's foundation was teaming up with two other groups, Icarus Interstellar and the Foundation for Enterprise Development.

DARPA has not yet publicly announced the selection, and my efforts to contact the agency's representatives have been unsuccessful so far. But after the BBC's story, the report was confirmed on the Centauri Dreams blog by Paul Gilster, who is affiliated with the Tau Zero Foundation. Gilster said Jemison's organization "now takes on the challenge of building a program that can last 100 years, and might one day result in a starship."

Adam Crowl, director of Icarus Interstellar, elaborated in a blog comment:

"... Project Icarus will keep running as it has since 2009, and the end point will be an interstellar probe design, chiefly fusion-propelled in the boost phase. That’s due at some point in 2014.

"Icarus Interstellar is a broader banner for a whole group of interstellar related research projects, Project Icarus being just one, which will be producing designs and doing basic research with the common goal of building the technical foundation required for eventual successful interstellar flight.

"Now in light of this news, we’ll be under the banner of the 100 Year Starship Organization, which covers more than just the technical aspects. Each of the triad came to our happy union with different strengths and emphases – Mae Jemison’s organization covering education and broader social goals, the Foundation for Enterprise Development covering innovative organization and operational approaches, and Icarus Interstellar covering the technical aspects. Together we’ll be working towards an organization that will last 100 years and produce a viable interstellar technology, with benefits for all humankind."

The $500,000 DARPA grant is intended to serve as seed money for the 100 Year Starship Organization. Meanwhile, the founder of Tau Zero, former NASA researcher Marc Millis, suggested in his email update that Tau Zero would lower its profile:

"It is too soon to know how this selection will affect Tau Zero's goal to rigorously and impartially guide progress toward interstellar flight.  With insufficient funding to go around, I feel that it would be a disservice to the community for Tau Zero to attempt to compete with this new organization, especially considering that this new organization now has significantly more than an order of magnitude more funding. I hope they serve the community well."

Millis said Centauri Dreams would "continue to operate as an impartial and articulate news source and discussion forum on all things interstellar."

Jemison has made a name for herself not only as the first black woman in space, but also as the first real-life astronaut to appear on a "Star Trek" episode. How big of a role will she and her partners play in turning the "Star Trek" vision into reality, and on what time scale? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 9 p.m. ET Jan. 9: DARPA confirmed the selection of Jemison's foundation in a brief statement attributed to Paul Eremenko, DARPA program manager, but indicated that the deal was not yet completely done:

"We can confirm that the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence has been selected for negotiation for a grant award for the 100 Year Starship effort. We have no further comment until the grant is awarded."

More about interstellar flight:

• Reality check for starships
• Billionaires wanted for starship plan
• Visionaries ponder 100-year starship
• Sex poses big challenge for interstellar travel
• Destination for first starship? Someplace that's livable
• The best options for flying to faraway stars

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Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

A team of San Francisco-based sleuths claimed a $50,000 prize from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today for correctly reconstructing a series of five shredded documents.

The accomplishment comes just 33 days after the DARPA Shredder Challenge was announced in a bid to improve the ability of warfighters to glean information quickly from confiscated, shredded documents.

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The challenge also provides insight to the potential vulnerabilities in the current practice of shredding sensitive national security documents, not to mention your own financial statements and personal notes.

The winning team, All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S., used custom-coded, computer vision algorithms to come up with suggested fragment pairings, which were then sent along to human assemblers for verification, the DARPA announcement explains.

They spent a total of 600 worker-hours developing algorithms and piecing together the documents, which were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces.

"Lots of experts were skeptical that a solution could be produced at all, let alone within the short time frame," Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA's Information Innovation Office, said in the statement. 

In all, nearly 9,000 teams registered to participate in the challenge. The most effective approaches used a blend of computational and old-fashioned detective work, the agency said.

The fact that the challenge has been completed should come as good news to soldiers attempting to read shredded documents — like the papers found, for example, in a Bin Laden hideout.

However, it also might make you pause next time you shred your latest bank statement. The practice may no longer be enough to keep your secrets safe. 

More on DARPA challenges:

• 2005: Stanford team wins robot race
• 2007: Driverless SUV wins $2 million Pentagon prize
• 2009: Balloon hunt nets $40,000 for MIT-led team
• 2011: DARPA wants to recycle space junk into new satellites

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

You can run, you can hide, but the masterminds in the military's high-tech research arm have their eyes on a gadget that will allow them to hear your racing heart even as you try to get lost in a crowd.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already has the technology to hear your heart as you crouch and cower in a dark corner across the room. Now the agency aims to increase its ability to do this at even greater distances, through walls — and even hear and distinguish between multiple hearts at once.

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The technology could help chase down terrorists who set off a bomb and then scatter into the fleeing crowd, for example. It could also help rescue victims trapped in the rubble from the explosion.

The goal of the agency's "Biometrics-at-a-distance" program is a technology that "can record human vital signs at a distance greater than 10 meters using non-line-of-sight and non-invasive or non-contact methods" and do this for up to 10 people at once.

The technology to do this, the agency suspects, is likely to build from electrocardiograms, which measure the heart's electrical activity. This is what doctors use, for example, to diagnose heart disease in people.

[Via Gizmodo]

More on DARPA tech:

• DARPA wants smarter machines
• 'Flying Humvee' moves ahead
• DARPA offers $50,000 prize for reading shredded messages
• How MIT team won balloon search-and-rescue challenge

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

DARPA's latest tech challenge is offering $50,000 for a task worthy of secret agents: piecing together messages that have been shredded into thousands of bits.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon think tank that previously brought you multimillion-dollar robo-car races and a nationwide hunt for red balloons, put five ripped-up puzzles online today to kick off its Shredder Challenge. If someone wins, and I'm betting that someone will, that would be good news and bad news for the Defense Department — and for folks like you and me.

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"The goal is to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community," DARPA said in its contest announcement.

Here's how the contest works: Participants register via the Shredder Challenge website, and then download five bunches of files that are essentially screenshots of shredded-up documents, plus instructions. They'll have to figure out how to put the documents back together, either by using computer analysis or by matching up itty-bitty pieces of printouts. Then they'll have to send DARPA an email with scans of the completed puzzles, the answers to questions about each puzzle ... and an explanation of the reasoning process that led to the solution.

Each of the puzzles carries a point value, and an online leader board will track the scores of the top contestants. DARPA will announce the winner and the amount of the prize awarded on Dec. 5, based on the points earned as well as the time stamps for submissions.

Hundreds sign up
"We are all pretty excited about this one," Dan Kaufman, director of the Information Innovation Office, told me in an email. So are puzzle fans: Soon after the competition opened, DARPA warned in a Twitter update that, "due to interest in the Shredder Challenge, there may be a delay accessing" the puzzle website. The Web traffic jam eased once DARPA beefed up its bandwidth.

Kaufman said this afternoon that "registrations were at 240 when I last checked, and not slowing down."

When I spoke with Kaufman, he said no one had yet submitted an entry. He couldn't predict whether it would take hours or days for puzzle sleuths to submit solutions. That's what makes the exercise interesting.

Kaufman's a veteran of 2009's Red Balloon Challenge, which asked participants to figure out the locations of 10 red balloons scattered around the country. He recalled that there was similar uncertainty about the outcome back then: "We were torn between 'It will never be solved' and 'Somebody's gotta solve this.'"

It turned out that researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab figured out the locations in just under nine hours, winning $40,000 in the process. A research paper published this week in the journal Science laid out the MIT team's winning strategy: a system of "recursive incentives" that promised payoffs for those who discovered the balloons, as well as those who recruited the discoverers.

MIT's Alexander Pentland and his colleagues said the recursive-reward arrangement could be used for life-and-death searches — for example, to look for a missing child, a criminal at large or the survivors of a natural disaster.

Good news, bad news
Kaufman told me that the winner of the Shredder Challenge may well use a method that DARPA's own researchers haven't thought of. Such methods could be used to read documents that have been shredded by the bad guys, such as al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan. "Currently, this process is much too slow and too labor-intensive, particularly if the documents are hand-written," Kaufman said in a news release. "We are looking to the Shredder Challenge to generate some leap-ahead thinking in this area."

Better message-demangling methods also could be used by bad guys to reconstruct financial statements, credit card reports and other sensitive documents that consumers thought had been safely disposed of.

"I'm concerned about the privacy implications," my colleague at msnbc.com's Red Tape Chronicles, Bob Sullivan, told me today.

Kaufman acknowledged that the contest's outcome might make you feel less secure about what happens to their shredded documents. But if that's the case, it's better to know that up front instead of burying your head in the sand. "I would say the 'ostrich defense' is not a good one," he told me.

Who knows? Maybe the first thing to come out of DARPA's latest challenge will be a rush to buy shredders that grind paper into powder. What do you think? Weigh in with your comments below.

Other challenges from DARPA:

• 2005: Stanford robo-car wins $2 million desert road race
• 2007: Driverless SUV wins $2 million Urban Challenge
• 2009: Balloon hunt nets $40,000 for MIT-led team
• 2011: DARPA wants to recycle space junk into satellites

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

A flying car that's rugged enough for hardcore off-road driving, able to survive small-arms fire and can quickly take off and land is potentially just a few years shy of reality, according to reports sourced from DARPA, the U.S. military's future-oriented research arm.

Aerospace companies Lockheed Martin and AAI Corporation have presented "feasible designs" to the military's Transformer program, reports Aviation Week's Ares blog, and have advanced to the next phase, which is to begin work on prototypes of the contraptions.

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Formal contracts for Phase 2 have yet to be awarded, AAI spokeswoman Sharon Corna told me in an email, but "it is my understanding that DARPA intends to proceed with us."

Presentation of prototypes of the so-called "flying Humvees" is expected at the end of fiscal 2012. If DARPA selects one of the designs for Phase 3, ground and flight demonstrations of a flying Humvee could occur in 2015.

Regular folks may soon be able to drive around Terrafugia's Transition roadable aircraft, which cleared regulatory hurdles this July. But that car, which is more like an airplane that drives and must take off and land at airports, is a far cry from what DARPA has in mind.

The military envisions a vehicle that can carry four soldiers and gear, take off and land vertically, be flown more than 250 miles on a tank of gas, and be operated by a "typical soldier," according to DARPA's program description. 

"Meeting these requirements is pushing the state of the art in lightweight materials and structure, high power-to-weight engines, and autonomous flight controls," Aviation Week notes.

More on flying cars:

• Flying car cleared for the road
• Flying car goes to market
• 7 flights of fancy that fizzled
• Dude, where's my flying car and jetpack?

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Scientists are tweaking bacteria to send encrypted messages that can be shipped via snail mail on sheets of paper-like material called nitrocellulose.

The recipient grows the bacteria with a select cocktail of nutrients and other chemicals. Once grown, each microbe glows one of seven colors when exposed to the right kind of light. Different colored microbes are arranged to represent different letters and symbols. If you know the nutrient and chemical cocktail as well as the keys to the code, you can decipher the message.

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For an added layer of security, many glowing microbes can be sent along, but only those that survive a dose of a particular antibiotic will reveal the intended message when exposed to the right light. 

"There are several layers of encoding in the message," Manuel Palacios, a chemist at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and lead author of a paper on the technique, told me today.

To prove the point, the team created a message that when exposed to ampicillin read "this is a bioencoded message from the walt lab at tufts university 2011." The drug kanamycin gave different glowing bacteria that encoded the message: "you have used the wrong cipher and the message is gibberish."

Palacios and his colleagues named this biological messaging steganography by printed arrays of microbes, or SPAM. They describe it in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The technology is rooted in funding from DARPA, the military's high-tech research agency, which suggests real-world spies could be communicating with messages encoded in arrays of glowing bugs. 

"I love that this triggers all this discussion about spies and stuff," Palacios noted, but said practical applications are more likely to be found in the biotech world.

For example, a biotech company that develops a high-yielding variety of genetically modified corn could use this technique to give the plant an easily-identifiable characteristic that thwarts attempts to steal it. 

Currently, biotech companies stamp the genetic code of their modified crops, but genetic sequencing in the lab is required to read the stamp.

"With this method, we are demonstrating that we can encode genetic information and we can decode it into something that just by looking at it you will be able to know what the message is," Palacios explained. 

In this case, the message isn't top secret. Rather it is not obvious. So, for example, a corn stalk could be engineered to carry a biobarcode that can identify the plant as proprietary.

"That's where we might be seeing an application in the future," Palacios said.

More on secret messages:

• Strange twists in a DNA message
• Plants that glow on their own developed
• Researchers store data in DNA bacteria
• Spy trick hides message in plain sight

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

 

 

 

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has sharpened its focus on a future where machines do most of the dirty work — and a good deal of the thinking, too.

Last week, the military think tank kicked off a program called Mind's Eye, which is aimed at developing "a visual intelligence capability for unmanned systems." This week, it sent out an announcement that hints at the agency's plans for a mathematical language that would give data-collecting sensors the ability to speak to each other, think for themselves, and take action with scant human interference.

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The Mind's Eye program essentially ups the ante for camera-equipped unmanned vehicles by giving them not just a processor for collecting visual information, but a "visual intelligence, enabling these platforms to detect operationally significant activity and report on that activity so warfighters can focus on important events in a timely manner." That would take boots off the ground and free data analysts from their chairs.

DARPA watchers have also pointed out an announcement calling for proposals to participate in the Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation, and Execution program, or MSEE. The announcement says MSEE's mission is to find new ways to handle a "data deluge."

"The amount of data collected by Department of Defense sensor systems far outstrips the ability of both human analysts and current automated decision systems to extract actionable information," it reads. In other words, all the data coming in from drones and satellites taking pictures and making videos, plus tapped phone lines and who knows what else, is simply too much. Instead of being helpful in stopping the bad guys, it's a hindrance.

MSEE seeks a unified mathematical language that can teach sensors what data to collect as well as how to interpret and act on it. The agency's call for proposals says the goal of the program is "to capture the economy and efficiency that derives from an intrinsic, objective-driven unification of sensing and exploitation." To get there, "all proposed research must describe a unifying mathematical formalism that incorporates stochasticity fundamentally."

Wired.com's Spencer Ackerman notes that in about three and a half years, the agency wants prototypes to "furnish sensor output products" from imagery and video, communications intercepts and the tracking of a moving target.

"If your algorithm can train those very distinct sensors how to determine for themselves what relevant data is, you'll have gone a long way to draining oceans of data into a customizable kiddie pool for military analysts," he writes.

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Skynet, anyone? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).