Technologies for Host Resilience (THoR)

This program strives to discover host tolerance mechanisms in order to identify a suite of interventions suitable for use in humans to mitigate the deleterious effects of infectious diseases. THoR is seeking novel methods and technologies to discover and understand these responses in hosts that are resilient when exposed to infectious diseases. Specifically, DARPA aims to discover the fundamental biological relationships that underlie host tolerance to infection in animal populations in order to provide the foundational knowledge required to develop interventions for potential transition into clinical use. This program is organized into three Technical Areas (TAs): 1) Identification and characterization of animal hosts with tolerant phenotypes; 2) Discovery of biological mechanisms that underlie tolerance; and 3) Identification of interventions that utilize tolerance mechanisms with the goal of reducing morbidity and mortality due to infection. This BAA will focus specifically on understanding tolerance mechanisms in prospective animal studies in conjunction with the analysis of retrospective pre-clinical and human clinical datasets.