Predict if an individual soldier will develop an infectious disease, prior to the onset of symptoms.

• Dr. Patrick Lincoln

• Dr. Steven Eker
• Dr. Patrick Lincoln
• Dr. Andrew Poggio
• Dr. Carolyn Talcott
• Dr. Ashish Tiwari
• Paul Thomas
• David S. Flamm
• Huaiyu Mi
• Robert Balog
• Travis Harrison
• Annalisa D'Andrea
• David E. Cooper
• Michael Vestel
• Gareth Dobson
• Janice Li

Current methods diagnose and treat individuals after they experience symptoms and report to a physician. The PHD Program seeks to alter this paradigm by identifying changes in the baseline state of human health through frequent surveillance. The vision is to maintain 100-percent warfighter readiness by detecting, intervening, and eliminating disease before the emergence of symptoms, potentially interrupting the course of outbreaks of flu or other infectious diseases.

Achieving this goal will require a multidisciplinary approach to diagnostics that includes, at the minimum, innovative data analytic methodologies coupled with traditional and nontraditional medical diagnostic parameters. Our end goal is to create the technological breakthroughs required for the development of a field-portable, point-of-care health assessment system that is able to handle large throughput in short time spans (under a 3-hour turnaround), at low costs.

In the much more distant future, we envision a very easy-to-use relatively non invasive device able to predict the course of disease, severity of symptoms, and infectiousness of the patient with sample-to-prediction time of 10 minutes for $10. Getting to this ambitious goal will require work beyond the scope of the current DARPA PHD program funding.