NTI - Global Security Newswire, 20 Apr 2010.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University believe they have hit upon a new way to reduce the time it takes to identify infectious agents and determine a treatment plan during a potential biological weapons attack.

Now, it could take as much as a day to determine through laboratory work what type of infectious agent was used in an act of bioterrorism. Additional time could be necessary to determine a correct treatment and whether the agent might have been altered for resistance against certain countermeasures.

However, if someone was contaminated with anthrax and not given the right medical treatment in less than 24 hours "the chances of survival are slim," according to Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab researcher Plamen Demirev.

"It's critical to be able to answer questions about drug susceptibility or resistance quicker," Demirev said.

Lives might have been spared had a faster diagnostic and treatment mechanism been available during the 2001 U.S. anthrax mailings that left five people dead, according to the Sun.

Demirev and a group of researchers at the Applied Physics Lab think that their new diagnostic system would allow for suspected pathogens and any potential drug resistance they carry to be identified in six hours.

The device is the result of 13 years of work by the Applied Physics Laboratory, an effort that was recently aided with $500,000 from the Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate.

The technology employs mass spectrometry to recognize and classify infectious agents by using a laser light to separate electrically charged particles from agent molecules. The ion particles are then analyzed and presented to researchers in computer graphs.

Drug-resistant microbes are identified by adding the pathogen to an array of cultures that contain various antibiotics. The mass spectrometer then uses its laser to search for stable isotopes coming off the cultures which indicate that the infectious agent has not been killed by the antibiotic. This allows scientists to determine which medical treatments would work on the disease strain.

"You need a half-hour to prepare the sample ... five hours to grow ... and a minute to analyze and get an answer for 30 samples," Demirev said. "it's a big improvement from the classical technology."

The $150,000 IsoMS-Drug Array could become available for mass-production and purchase if it receives approval from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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