In Brief

Biodetection

It's been more than three years since anthrax mailings dominated the national headlines and squeezed the public's psyche in a vise grip of paranoia and fear. At that time, letters tainted with anthrax spores were mailed to a number of places.

By Todd Datz

June 01, 2005 — CSO — Although bioterrorism has fallen off the front pages, the

threat hasn't gone away. Just ask the firefighters and other public safety

workers who still don their hazmat suits, hop in their vehicles, and speed off

to locations to gather and test unknown white substances in envelopes.

Responding to these incidents (most of which are hoaxes) and testing the substances

in labs can be a costly drag on overtaxed resources, such as local fire

departments.

Proper screening of unknown substances at the scene is a

critical component of the detection process now that faster, more accurate

portable detection technologies have entered the marketplace. One of the

companies in this space is GenPrime, which, prior to the anthrax scare in 2001,

sold the bulk of its testing products to fermentation industries to measure

yeast counts and the like. After the anthrax mailings, the company was

approached by investors, a senator and a congressman about the possibility of

developing a screening tool to detect toxic substances, says Buck Somes,

GenPrime's cofounder.

Today, GenPrime offers a biodetection system called Prime

Alert. It's a test kit that can be used onsite by first responders to detect

the presence of bacterial agents. (The Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention list 13 known bacterial agents that can be used as biological

weapons, including anthrax, plague, tularemia, typhoid fever and cholera.

Besides bacteria, there are two other categories of bioweapons: toxins, such as

ricin, and viruses.) Prime Alert is a broad-spectrum screenmeaning it's broad

enough to detect all bacterial threats. (It detects some but not all toxins and

viruses.) According to Somes, it's the only product currently on the market

that can do so. Many tests, such as handheld assays, test for only a single

agent, such as anthrax.

Included in the Prime Alert kit is a microbe screen, a toxin

screen and a handheld unit. The system uses fluorescence-detection technology

to determine whether bacteria is present. It can also test for the toxins ricin

and botulinum. The company says its product can detect harmful substances in

less than 10 minutes and that the tests have a false-positive rate of less than

4 percent. Accurate readings mean first responders can make decisions with more

confidence than if they, say, run a specific-agent test for anthrax; if an

anthrax test gets a negative result, that rules out anthrax only, not any other

bioweapons.

Customers currently using Prime Alert include the U.S.

Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Chicago Fire Department,

the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and United States Steel. The

kit retails for $9,500. Each microbe and toxin screenused once, then

discardedcosts $110.

GenPrime

www.genprime.com

CombiMatrix

Offers biothreat-detection technology, including portable

• Email
• Print
• Comments
• Digg This
• SlashDot