Augmentation of Immune System Response to Novel Pathogens Through Symbiotic Cell Engineering

The vision of this project is the engineering of cells (either novel, or based on in-vivo templates) whose aim is to enhance several properties (activation timing, regulation of level of response, enhancement of defense against novel pathoges, etc) of the Immune System response for Home Sapiens.

The deliverables for this particular project are multiple:

• A specification describing both high level and low level details of an enhanced response system for humans.
• A number of biological products (cells and protein factors) to be delivered to human hosts. The cells are going to be implementing the specification of the enhanced response system, co-inhabiting the human and cooperating with the natural immune system cells and processes to better safeguard the host’s health.
• A verification report to health authorities that the product is conforming to the specification and that side effects are guaranteed to be absent.

Expressed aims

The final product is going to be able to enhance performance of a host’s immune system with regards to the following aspects:

• Shortened response time against pathogens (especially novel ones).
• Guarding against inflamation and disease.
  • Better handling of auto-immune diseases.
  • Better detection, targetting and neutralisation of cancerous cells and growths.

The achievement of these two goals is going to allow for second-order benefits for a wider-class of stakeholders, regardless of whether they have been enhanced or not. These include:

• Tighter response to a potential pandemic outbreak of a novel pathogen.
  • The system helps respond against the pathogen, reducing r0, and buying precious time for second-degree responders (clinicians on the front-line, vaccine developers, etc).
  • Gets much needed further protection for essential workers during a pandemic, as it gives them one more vector working to neutralise unknown pathogenous agents.
    • This would allow for a milder disease due to lessening of the initial exposure viral load.
• Lightening of load to local hospitals.
  • Seasonal outbreaks of some endemic diseases (for example, the flu) should be greatly diminished.
  • Several auto-immune disorders or cancer-developments are going to be diminished.
• Allows for greater bio-safety measures for research labs, as potentially exposed researchers also have one more layer of defense installed in their systems, buying time for a second-degree response in the case of an exposure event.

Governance, Regulations and other Considerations

• It is understood that the aim of the project is to enhance bio-security.
  • An explicit aim of the project is to shorten the response time for a reaction against novel pathogens.
  • This is expected to be very valuable in breaking the exponential growth of a pandemic based on a novel or mutated vector, to allow for a better targeted or more coordinated response by the scientific community.
• It is understood that the aim of the project is to formally verify as much of the system against its formal specification as possible.
  • A verification report to health authorities that the product is conforming to the specification and that side effects are guaranteed to be absent.
  • Techniques deployed in the verification of hardware and software systems are going to be deployed to verify the enhanced response system against its specification.
  • It has been advised that because of the complexity of live human-host systems, absolute guarantees about safety of whole system may be absent. In that case, it is still the aim that as much as possible of the system is going to be formally verified.
• As with many emerging technologies, there exist potential concerns over dual-use.
  • White-box understanding of the implementation would allow a malicious actor to repurpose the system to be deployed in an offensive rather than the intended defensive capacity.
  • This disallows exporting of the system to non-EU countries.
    • It is unknown if the guidance still applies after Brexit in the U.K.
    • Because of the integration of E.U. law to the U.K. law, and lack of newer guidance, it is assumed that the system for now can only be deployed on human hosts living within the E.U. and the U.K.
  • Because of these concerns, the project implementor is aiming to keep as much of the implementation as possible secret, and only provide a report that the final product meets the specification to the appropriate health and research regulation authorities.
    • It is under consideration whether that verification guarantee can be issued in a zero-knowledge factor, as that would obscure specification details that might allow malicious actors to gain insight on a potential implementation of the system.
• There are considerations around the interoperability of a system like this with other health products (vaccines, etc).
  • The system is expected to interoperate relatively well, but design constraints may exist that limit the effectiveness of the interoperability.
  • Preliminary reports from the scientific team suggest that there exists a way for vaccine payloads (either lipid/mrna based or viral-vector based) to signal to the synthetic cells their purpose through a particular protein expressed either on the lipid capsule or the cell’s membrane.
    • That would act like an authentication key of sorts, and every legitimate vaccine developer could acquire a specific protein-signature to mark their products with. This allows for automatic recognition of any organism not bearing the flag as counterfeit and potentially hostile.