PANTHER Sensor Quickly Detects Pathogens

Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have developed a powerful sensor that can detect airborne pathogens such as anthrax and smallpox in less than three minutes.

The new device, called PANTHER (for PAthogen Notification for THreatening Environmental Releases), represents a "significant advance" over any other sensor, says James Harper of Lincoln Lab's Biosensor and Molecular Technologies Group. Current sensors take at least 20 minutes to detect harmful bacteria or viruses in the air, but the PANTHER sensors can do detection and identification in less than 3 minutes.

The technology has been licensed to Innovative Biosensors, Inc. (IBI) of Rockville, Md. In January, IBI began selling a product, BioFlash, that uses the PANTHER technology.

"There is a real need to detect a pathogen in less than three minutes, so you have time to take action before it is too late," says Harper, the lead scientist developing the sensor.

The PANTHER sensor uses a cell-based sensor technology known as CANARY (after the birds sent into mines to detect dangerous gases), and can pick up a positive reading with only a few dozen particles per liter of air.

The device could be used in buildings, subways and other public areas, and can currently detect 24 pathogens, including anthrax, plague, smallpox, tularemia and E. coli.

"There's really nothing out there that compares with this," said Todd Rider of Lincoln Lab's Biosensor and Molecular Technologies Group, who invented the CANARY sensor technology.

Rider started developing CANARY in 1997 when he realized that there were no sensors available that could rapidly detect pathogens. His idea was to take advantage of nature's own defense system--specifically the B cells that target pathogens in the human body. "B cells in the body are very fast and very sensitive," Rider says.

The CANARY concept uses an array of B cells, each specific to a particular bacterium or virus. The cells are engineered to emit photons of light when they detect their target pathogen. The device then displays a list of any pathogens found.

CANARY is the only sensor that makes use of immune cells. Other available sensors are based on immunoassays or PCR (polymerase chain reaction), which take much longer and/or are not as sensitive as CANARY.

Rider and colleagues first reported the success of CANARY (which stands for Cellular Analysis and Notification of Antigen Risks and Yields) in the journal Science in 2003. Since then, they have been working to incorporate the technology into a portable device that could be used in a variety of settings where environmental threats might exist.

The new device, PANTHER, takes the CANARY technology and combines it with an air sampler that brings pathogens into contact with the detector cells. The prototype sensor is about a cubic foot and weighs 37 pounds and is well suited to building-protection applications. With minor modifications it could also enhance biological detection capabilities for emergency responders.

CANARY has been tested in rural and coastal environments as well as urban ones. It could eventually be used on farms or in food-processing plants to test for contamination by E. coli, salmonella, or other food-borne pathogens.

Another potential application is in medical diagnostics, where the technology could be used to test patient samples, giving rapid results without having to send samples to a laboratory.

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Study May Show How to Forestall Fatal, Viral Immune Meltdown

When a virus infects a person, it triggers a series of biochemical reactions in immune-system cells that literally may have life or death consequences.

Usually, the result is an effective immune response, leading to the elimination of the virus and the infected person’s recovery. But in the case of some of the world’s deadliest pathogens — including the Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever viruses, as well as the influenza virus strain responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic — the immune system itself actually becomes the most dangerous element of the disease. All too often, a sudden immune overreaction sends the infected person into a shock-like state from which he or she may never recover.

Now, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) believe they’ve found a way to spot the biochemical profile of an inappropriate immune response to viral infection — an important step toward developing new therapies that may head off or stop an otherwise fatal immune system meltdown.

In a paper published in the February 14 issue of the Journal of Virology, highlighted in the journal’s “Spotlight” section and available now online, the scientists describe using a newly developed protein-scanning chip and a uniquely capable computer database to examine the activation and deactivation of more than a thousand proteins in cells from guinea pigs infected with two different strains of Pichinde virus. Guinea pigs infected with one of the Pichinde strains experience no ill effects, while those infected with the other strain develop symptoms similar to those seen in humans infected by the much more dangerous Lassa virus, which can cause an acute hemorrhagic fever and kills about 5,000 people a year in West Africa. (During some Lassa fever epidemics, as many as 50 percent of those diagnosed with the disease have died from it.)

“With these two forms of the virus and this new technology, we were able to compare pathogenic immune response and protective immune response on a broad, global level,” said lead author and UTMB postdoctoral fellow Gavin Bowick. He said that checking almost 1,200 interactions simultaneously let the researchers see the big picture of immune response, avoiding the contradictory results often produced by studies that focus on only a single biochemical pathway.


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