Super-powered soldiers.

• Author: Insinna, Valerie

Tomorrow's troops may look more like the superheroes from the Avengers comic books than G.I. Joes. As medical and biotechnology advances, the military's research organizations are putting more emphasis on creating super soldiers with improved performance, strength and the ability to better survive serious injury.

Everything from Wolverine's self-healing powers to Iron Man's suit is within the realm of possibility

Leading the charge is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which launched its biological technologies office in April. One goal is "cultivating new discoveries that help maintain peak warfighter abilities and restoring those abilities as quickly and fully as possible when they are degraded," a DARPA news release stated.

Programs include high-tech, robotic prosthetics and a device that can be implanted in a soldier's brain to help restore memories lost after an injury. DARPA is also developing a putty-like material that can be packed in and around compound fractures, allowing doctors to eschew setting the injury with plates, rods and screws. The putty would harden to a bone-like structure, enabling normal, load-bearing use of the limb within days.

One of the agency's newest initiatives, the ElectRx program announced this August, aims to develop tiny robots that could be injected into a soldier's body, conferring self-healing powers.

"Instead of relying only on medication, we envision a dosed-loop system that would work in concept like a tiny, intelligent pacemaker," Doug Weber, ElectRx program manager, stated in a release. "It would continually assess conditions and provide stimulus patterns tailored to help maintain healthy organ function, helping patients get healthy and stay healthy using their body's own systems."

The peripheral nervous system regularly monitors the body's internal organs, but when a person is injured or sick, it can exacerbate negative symptoms like pain, inflammation or a weakened immune system, the release stated. DARPA wants to create miniscule implants that can regulate nerve signals, helping the body to heal more quickly.

Under the Warrior Web program, DARPA is developing a lightweight, conformal tmdersuit to help reduce a dismounted soldier's risk of musculoskeletal injury while carrying more than 100 pounds of gear.

"The added weight while bending, running, squatting, jumping and crawling in a tactical environment increases the risk of musculoskeletal injury, particularly on vulnerable areas...