Illuminated by the bluish glow of moonlight, a chopper descends over palm trees both tropical and ominously Jurassic. The blades’ powerful rotation is impossibly quiet, a force evidenced only by the wild movements of surrounding fronds and foliage. Inside the helicopter, a specialized strike force prepares to deploy into the remote South American jungle. This area is known to heavily feature the “kissing bug,” a brown-and-black patterned insect that often carries Trypanosoma cruzi — a parasitic organism that causes Chagas disease. Initial symptoms of Chagas, including fever and body aches, can last for months, and untreated cases develop into decades-long chronic conditions. These particular soldiers, however, have no need to worry. A couple of days prior to this drop, they self-administered a new sort of nanoparticle-enabled, prophylactic Chagas vaccine. If an exposure to T. cruzi occurs, the nanoparticles will be spurred into action, significantly reducing both the severity of the acute disease phase and the risk of developing chronic symptoms.

This hypothetical Chagas scenario was presented to me by Jake Adler, the 20-year-old founder of Pilgrim, a company working to leverage nanotechnology, bioelectronics, autonomous sensors, and AI systems to usher in a new era of supersoldiers and anti-threat biosurveillance. The company recently raised a $3.25 million round led by Thiel Capital, Cantos, and Refactor to pursue this vision. Pilgrim aims to navigate the minefield of government absurdity, leveraging its quirks and failures in order to rapidly deploy usable biotech that will act as a force multiplier on our troops and revamp systems that are meant to protect us against biological warfare. In other words? Pilgrim wants to make supersoldiers, produce futuristic dual-use medical technology, and catch the next pandemic before it even begins.

Jake, a previous recipient of the Thiel Fellowship, has been experimenting with biotech since his early teens. He originally founded a sleep-tech company called Neusleep, iterating on a sleep mask that was designed to “shock you to sleep,” out of his grandmother’s old folks home, raising $275k from various sources in the process. Starting a biotech company at a place where, by his recollection, there was a sign explicitly prohibiting the presence of adult diapers in the pool, is a wonderful brand of irony. He has since graduated to the resourceful oddities of purchasing “tummy tuck” skin for the ex vivo testing of rapid wound-repair solutions, sneaking into (and getting kicked out of) defense conferences, and (subsequently) pitching government officials on bioweapons protections from a makeshift booth of upside-down trash bins behind said conference center. All of this to say, Pilgrim will do more than pay lip service to the archetypal “where there’s a will, there’s a way” methodology of getting things done as an undersized, roguelike startup.

This translates into a policy at Pilgrim of eschewing eons-long research and development pipelines, instead looking for ways to build and validate solutions that are deployable on a much shorter timescale. Before I spoke with him about Pilgrim, Jake sent me a video that was hyperlinked with the text “cutting holes in my leg and bleeding on camera to test our rapid wound-healing tech.” This was, as it turns out, a literal and exact description of the video: it showed Jake in some kind of scientific laboratory using a little green medical instrument to screw one hole into each of his thighs. Over one thigh wound, Jake applied a typical bandage. On the other, he placed a small, chip-like adhesive. Within a few minutes, while the typical band-aid-type solution failed to even remain adhered to the skin, the self-tested, Pilgrim-made adhesive had largely stopped the bleeding. This sort of scrappy resourcefulness seems characteristic of both Jake and the company that he’s working to build.

The rapid wound-healing tech Jake was self-testing is based on a nanoparticle platform that uses electrical currents to accelerate clot formation and guide the migration of tissue-regenerating cells to the injury site, speeding up both the short-term and longer-term healing processes. (The use of electroconductive nanomaterials has been shown in research to have both antibacterial and accelerative properties in wound healing.) Part of Pilgrim’s “Voyager” biotech project, these bio-hybrid adhesives are the kind of useful application that Jake hopes to get on battlefields as quickly as possible. More than this, it’s a glimpse into the future kit of what we might think of as a supersoldier — the beginning of a real-life Stim Shot (Call of Duty’s tactical equipment item that allows you to quickly heal up after you’ve been shot, for the non-gamers.) Part of a vision where battle medics are able to stop bleeding faster, save more lives, and hasten return-to-health timelines of the injured.

The prototype in Jake’s self-testing video is small, but could be scaled up both in size and power. Imagine large gashes and visceral holes that would have otherwise been mortal, sealed up with a piece of biotechnology that leverages the body’s own ability to heal itself in order to pull off miraculous feats of emergency medical treatment. A lower limb, oozing and riddled with shrapnel wounds, crackles with microcurrents as the aesthetically circuit-like adhesive attracts platelets into place like some kind of biohybrid magnet. And you want to use gauze?

The current widely used anti-hemorrhagic, which Pilgrim wants to supplement and supplant with their bio-hybrid adhesives, is something called QuikClot — a hemostatic material which accelerates the body’s natural clotting process. Now ubiquitous in both military and civilian medical applications, QuikClot was approved by the FDA in 2002. Beyond the obvious opportunity to innovate on a technology that has been largely unchanged since 2009, when QuikClot products transitioned from zeolite to kaolin after the former was causing burns, the story of QuikClot contains an interesting truth about the invention and approval of medical biotech. The entire process, from the military learning about the existence of QuikClot to its deployment with U.S. troops, took only seven months. There were zero human clinical trials before this — in-vivo testing in pigs (i.e. cutting pigs open and applying QuikClot to see what happens) was the extent of the validation. All the animals survived, and the stuff was summarily shipped off to Afghanistan and Iraq for troop use.

How is this possible? Doesn’t it take years, if not decades, for new medicines and biotechnology to go from prototype to government-approved circulation? The key is, as Jake explained to me, an accelerated pathway connecting the DoD and FDA pipelines. The FDA has something called a “Breakthrough Therapy” designation, which it awards to drugs intended to treat serious or life-threatening conditions in order to expedite their approval processes. Even more streamlined than this, however, is an interdepartmental process, between the DoD and the FDA, mediated by legal memoranda signed at the end of 2017. The joint program, part of which is The Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), covers both CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear) threats and battlefield trauma care. It provides an approval mechanism which can be used to expedite biotech and drug pipelines beyond the Breakthrough Therapy designation.

When this mechanism is put to use, the company developing the technology even receives an “FDA liaison” via the DoD that, in Jake’s words, would make an “astounding difference” in how quickly Pilgrim’s innovations could be approved and deployed. (This arrangement, for instance, played a major role in Operation Warp Speed’s ability to develop and distribute COVID mRNA vaccines as quickly as it did.) To further oil the bureaucratic gears in Pilgrim’s favor, Jake seeks out federal employees who have “warrant authority” — the ability to sign off on purchase orders, essentially — in order to understand their worldviews and frame the tech that he is developing appropriately. This is a microcosm of why, and how, Jake hopes to leverage the DoD’s tendencies and positioning in order to turn Pilgrim into a powerhouse of developing “batshit crazy,” as he put it, biotech solutions.

Instead of going really niche, as biotech companies are wont to do, and spending $600k on instruments that are geared toward solving some intensely specific or obscure problem (e.g. a rare disease of some sort), Pilgrim looks to take a broader and more iterative approach. Building the Voyager nanoparticle technology, for example, is infrastructural in nature. That is to say, its potential applications go far beyond creating the real life Call of Duty Stim Shot. The Chagas vaccine scenario is another way Pilgrim will leverage their Voyager technology. Even more extreme than this hypothetical antiparasitic prophylactic, but based on the same underlying principles of operation, is the potential to create nerve agent vaccines that preemptively make our supersoldiers immune to Sarin gas, V-series agents like VX, anthrax, and more. (Pilgrim is currently working with Botulinum, anthrax, and Paraoxon, a highly toxic chemical that was used for assassinations in Apartheid South Africa, in a validation and testing capacity.)

Jake self-admittedly characterized Pilgrim as, ultimately, “not really a defense company,” referring to the DoD as a possible “launchpad” for future civilian applications of Pilgrim’s tech — in other words, a lot of this stuff will have major dual-use applications. The Voyager nanoparticle technology, for example, could be used to significantly increase delivery mechanisms for vaccines and gene therapies.

The COVID mRNA vaccine, for instance, leverages lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) in order to deliver genetic material into human cells. Since both the LNPs themselves and the mRNA contained within them degrade (or get otherwise impeded) extremely easily, these vaccines require both cold storage and a massive amount of mRNA (since the majority of vessels are unable to successfully deliver the genetic material intracellularly). Only a very small percentage of the mRNA in COVID-19 vaccines is effectively delivered into cells; in other words, they have to put 100 micrograms of mRNA in each dose of the Moderna vaccine because only a few micrograms (or less) reach the targeted cells and get translated. The responsive polymers used in the Voyager nanoplatform could greatly increase the efficiency of this delivery mechanism, reimagining future vaccine development. (Various types of polymer usage has been shown in research to work both in nerve agent vaccine applications and mRNA vaccine delivery.)

Pilgrim’s other technological pillar is Argus — named after the 100-eyed giant from Greek mythology who sleeps with (at least) one eye open — a biosurveillance concept driven by sensor nodes and AI-powered software. Jake told me that his inspiration for Argus stemmed from his love of Plague Inc., a popular real-time strategy game where players develop and control pathogens with the goal of infecting and eliminating all of humanity. Now working with DHS and CIA leadership on Argus, he envisions building out a system like the interface seen in Plague Inc. that can track and evaluate the movement and containment status of various biothreats on a global level. Imagine being able to see on a single screen, with remarkable precision, a biological heatmap of the prevalence of various viruses and their infection rates across the Earth.

Jake reiterated the frequently used framing of biological weapons as a “poor man’s nuke,” a sentiment that carries with it more weight than ever post-COVID. He highlighted the ease with which he was able to acquire anthrax and paraoxon for the development and validation of the Voyager-powered nerve agent vaccines as a way to emphasize the lack of protections that we have around this sort of risk. The Argus distributed platform would be able to detect threats both known and unknown, identifying and interdicting viruses (both engineered and zoonotic) and other biological threats (anthrax, nerve agents, and so on).

When might an Argus-like system prove crucial? Picture a flickeringly lit basement of harsh light and dank concrete, a collection of hunched men stoop over metal tables and a slew of biological equipment, both makeshift and refurbished. Agar plates, hazmat suits, trash cans labeled for biohazardous waste, and the quiet murmuring of paranoid people birthing atrocities. Their work is, a few days later, strategically released into a quasi-urban American hub. A number of unsuspecting folks fall deathly ill, and local doctors are puzzled. The adjacent city, however, is equipped with an Argus sensor node, constantly monitoring for previously unknown biological threats such as the one unleashed in the next town over. Its multispectral sensor detects this unexpected virion, conducts imaging and analysis, then feeds the data into its foundational AI model for evaluation. This model reads the biothreat’s genomic data, determining with high confidence its mode of transference, potential lethality, and provenance (whether it is engineered or zoonotic, and, if engineered, how and by whom). The system recognizes it as a major and unprecedented risk, alerting government and medical authorities so action can be taken to contain the spread and mitigate the attack’s impact.

Argus, in addition to scenarios like the one above, has a wide range of potential applications beyond domestic biodefense due to its nodal, decentralized structure. Covert military teams could install Argus units around labs in China, Russia, and North Korea that the United States is interested in monitoring for evidence of gain of function research or other more direct bioweapons development programs. This is more of a live threat than ever to global safety, with COVID serving as an obvious case study after leaking from the lab in Wuhan, and with Planet Labs recently identifying Russia’s expansion of biological research facilities at military research sites around Moscow — the layouts and presence of dozens of rooftop air conditioning units imply that these are BSL-4 level laboratories working on what could very well be biological weapons that require high-containment infrastructure. The Sergiev Posad-6 site has a history of Cold War bioweapons development and was largely inactive prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Moscow’s lack of transparency has raised concerns that Russia is reviving its biological weapons capabilities under the guise of biodefense. The next time something like COVID-19 (or worse) is created and escapes the lab, intentionally or not, we need to know immediately. Argus could enable that.

A biosurveillance system like Argus would also have domestic applications like building out more robust TSA scanners at American airports. Right now, we are blind to the transportation of biological threats on commercial airliners. If you take bioengineered viruses through security in a suitcase, nobody is going to stop you, because nobody is going to know. This seems like an unacceptable level of risk. If some bad actor wanted to spread his custom-built pandemic agent, what better way to do it than by infecting hundreds of travelers bustling through busy airports to various destinations across the world?

Consider also the fentanyl crisis. A system like Argus might give us greater ability to detect the transportation of drugs over the border. We could even go so far as to equip our drones, which are now flying under stealth into sovereign Mexico in order to aid in their detection of fentanyl production sites, with portable versions of these nodes (or the ability to install them at particular chokepoints). Having an autonomous network of modular sensor meshes that can be used for all types of biothreat identification seems like the futuristic solution for an urgent, ongoing, and inadequately addressed national security issue.

The current state of affairs when it comes to biosurveillance is one whose absurdity would be hilarious if it weren’t abjectly terrifying. The government’s present solution, something called BioWatch (created in 2003 in response to the 2001 anthrax attacks), is deployed in 35 major metropolitan jurisdictions spanning only 22 of the 50 U.S. states. Of the 35 jurisdictions where BioWatch is in operation, only one had not been offline due to being unplugged or otherwise tampered with. The OIG report documented hundreds of instances in which someone simply unplugged a public unit to, for example, charge their laptop. The program also only looks for 6 of the 14 known pertinent biological agents identified by the Department of Homeland Security. So in addition to only monitoring for 43% of the known high-priority threats, it also cannot detect any unknown or emerging threats. In a word? Bonkers.

In many ways, Pilgrim’s work and vision underscore just how drastically unprepared we are for the looming — or, perhaps, already arrived — era of biological chaos. BioWatch’s unplugged sampling kiosks, easy access to lethal agents, and the continuing possibility of someone cooking up in their proverbial bedroom something far worse than COVID-19 all paint a fuzzy but ominous picture of our starkly apparent vulnerabilities. Jake, instead of feeling resigned to the glacial pace of theoretical research and horse-blinders-narrowed scope of traditional biotech pipelines, wants Pilgrim to attack these issues head-on with tangible, field-deployable solutions. While its relationship with the DoD is still informal, if Pilgrim is able to use the DoD as a launchpad, the company could shortcut bureaucratic holdups and get to the part where we start making supersoldiers and bringing the interface of Plague Inc. to life (before we start living in the latter’s live gameplay).

Pilgrim’s Voyager nanoplatform and Argus biosurveillance projects balance futuristic ambition with unwavering practicality. From rapid wound-healing Stim-Shot-style futurisms to preemptive immunity against the deadliest nerve agents, from catching nascent pandemics to stopping DIY terrorists cold in their tracks, Pilgrim hopes to address the vulnerabilities we’ve been, for some reason, ignoring — aiming to reverse the standard “fret and forget” mindset around biological threats and warfare risks. While much of this is still in the early development phase, and will no doubt prove a massive undertaking of political willpower and technical prowess, it is important not to take what Pilgrim is doing and relegate it to the category of “maybe someday” overly enthusiastic e/acc utopianism. The problems that Jake Adler wants to address are here, today, staring us in the face. Biological risks are dynamically evolving and swirling around us at an ever-faster pace, threatening to wreak havoc on the unprepared — this is the urgency behind and impetus for Pilgrim’s work.

— G. B. Rango