APL Inventions Focus On Homeland Security

By Len Lazarick



The "Inventions of the Year" awards by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory reflect a small but growing focus on homeland security issues at the North Laurel research campus best known for its work on missiles, naval warfare and space exploration.

The nation's largest university defense research facility, with $540 million a year in government funding, honored the three inventors of a new portable mass spectrometer that dramatically reduces the time to detect toxic chemicals and disease agents that could be used in a terrorist attack. Another inventor was honored for developing new software that will quickly compile and correlate initial emergency room complaints, the sort of information increasingly being used to assess the spread of illnesses that might also be caused by an attack.

"At APL, there's a lot of activity in homeland security," said Robert Cotter, a chemist and the lead investigator on the new mass spectrometer. "We've all been involved in that before 9/11."

Cotter heads the Middle Atlantic Mass Spectrometry Lab at the Hopkins School of Medicine, and he developed the new device with two APL researchers, Wayne Bryden and Scott Ecelberger. This is part of Hopkins' increased emphasis on bringing scientists and engineers from different units together to tackle pressing public problems. Cotter's research is funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

"Everything has a mass, so the mass spectrometer should be able to identify anything," Cotter pointed out.

Mass spectrometers are used in many research, commercial and industrial processes to identify substances by electrically charging molecules to ionize them. This works well for volatile chemicals, but biological agents are "more complicated than that," said Cotter. These higher weight molecules can be identified with a new process called matrix-assisted laser desportion/ionization, MALDI, a technique that won its inventors the Nobel Prize this year.

Most spectrometers are devoted to a specific use and are often the size of a refrigerator, but the challenge for the Hopkins researchers was to develop one that identified both lethal chemicals and bioagents, and make it small enough that it is portable for security screening.

"Our invention flips back and forth" between chemical and biological sensors, and "runs them both at the same time," Cotter said, using two ionization techniques in the same machine. And since "nobody's making a small mass spectrometer," commercially, "we really have to produce the small mass spectrometer" ourselves. This led to the prototype for the time-of-flight mass spectrometer that is the size of a desktop computer.

Based as he is in a medical school, Cotter's research has been focused on diagnosis and assessing proteins that come from organisms. To research the new detectors for lethal bioagents, the researchers don't actually employ real pathogens but "simulants" that mimic their molecular structure. But the machines also have to be able to detect lethal pathogens in an environment that often contains many simulants. BT (Bacillus thuringiensis), for instance, is a naturally occurring, soil-borne organism that is widely used to control insect pests in an environmentally friendly way, but it is also "similar to anthrax," Cotter said. "BT is ubiquitous, so it masks any bacillus."

The new information software honored by APL helps hospitals and health officials identify outbreaks of illnesses that could be caused by a bioterrorism attack. Carol Sniegoski of APL's National Security Technology Department developed the software to overcome the problem of how to quickly compile emergency room initial complaint records-often written in nonstandard text, with inconsistent spelling, vocabulary and grammar-so they can be used to monitor geographic regions for indications of chemical or biological weapons attack.

Written in Visual Basic for use with Microsoft Access data, the new software automatically processes unstructured emergency room complaint records in real time, sorting the records into standard disease syndrome groupings. The software is superior to present natural language processing techniques that do not work well with the error-prone, non-standard text appearing in medical records.

This innovative ER monitoring software is incorporated in the ESSENCE II-Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics System-also developed at APL and deployed at more than 300 U.S. military health facilities worldwide. According to APL, the software has demonstrated near 100% accuracy in several tests that compared its results with those of manual syndrome groupings.

Hospitals and public health officials see applications for use in other biosurveillance systems and in automating the standard processing of hospital records.

A third invention recognized by APL is a new blood test for detecting very low levels of a parasite that causes malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that afflicts more than 400 million people each year worldwide, killing an estimated 2.7 million people. The new blood test, which also employs a time-of-flight mass spectrometer, can detect a small concentration of parasites in just minutes, as opposed to current tests which take an hour and can only detect higher levels of parasites from a much larger blood sample. Malaria researchers say that with continuous, affordable surveillance to promptly diagnose new cases, it may be possible to administer immediate, aggressive treatment and eventually eliminate the disease, according to APL.

An independent, outside review panel selected the winners from 123 APL inventions, representing the work of 204 inventors, based on the inventions' potential to benefit society, to improve existing technology and to be licensed commercially.