Developments to Watch: Smart Sniffers For Chemical Weapons

Business Week | July 1, 2002 | Neil Gross

[Stand Watch Listen]

In early June, a routine environmental inspection turned up traces of nerve gas at a military base in Uzbekistan that thousands of U.S. soldiers had passed through. Personnel were immediately evacuated, but it took days to positively identify the deadly traces. That's because today's chemical-weapons detection kits are quick to sense danger but do a poor job of sorting one warfare agent from another. To these kits, which are based on the reaction of natural enzymes to poisons, nerve gas can look just like a less harmful but chemically similar pesticide.

With a grant from the military, biotech startup Semorex Inc. is developing polymers that could inexpensively mimic certain properties of the enzymes in current chemical-detection kits and outperform in them in some tasks. Known as molecularly imprinted polymers, or MIPs, these tiny plastic particles are dotted with cavities engineered to trap specific molecules, including organophosphate toxins such as sarin and other nerve gases. Natural enzymes respond more quickly, says Semorex Chief Scientific Officer Bernard Green, but MIPs could actually I.D. the culprit. And detection is just the start. Because the polymers encapsulate the poisons, MIPs could be used in mop-up operations--either sprayed as aerosols, or embedded in fabrics. In the civilian arena, Semorex is designing MIPs that could be ingested, to rid the body of toxins linked to cancer and other diseases.

By Neil Gross

[doug from upland]

There is a sniffer device in use in England in one of the busiest ports in the world that is sniffing for traces of nitrates in cargo containers. That device could be installed within a tunnel or speed bumb on the perimeter of an airport and solve a number of our concerns.

[Dark Wing]

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