Research Looks To Detect Chemical Warfare Agents

Main Category: Bio-terrorism / Terrorism
Also Included In: Biology / Biochemistry
Article Date: 30 May 2007 - 0:00 PDT

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Cutting-edge research at South Dakota State University could give doctors a longer window of time in which to find out whether someone has been exposed to chemical warfare agents.

Assistant professor Brian Logue in SDSU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is doing the lab studies to find out whether a person's hair can store the chemical markers of such agents.

The federal Department of Defense has awarded Logue a grant of about $350,000 to carry out the research over a three-year period.

Logue has already carried out more than $500,000 in research for the Department of Defense that focuses on detecting "metabolites" of chemical warfare agents in medical matrices such as blood, urine, tissue, and possibly saliva.

The new project is different in that it makes use of the ability of the human body to entrap chemicals within hair as the hair is being formed. This occurs because the blood containing those chemical compounds nourishes the hair follicles, Logue explained.

"A metabolite is basically a breakdown product of a parent compound," Logue said. "If you get exposed to a chemical warfare agent, the body wants to break that down and get rid of it. So it'll break it down by changing it to a different chemical. That other end-product chemical is what we call the 'metabolite.' It's from a metabolic process."

One issue in detecting chemical warfare agents, nerve agents in particular, is that they only stay in the blood or the urine for five days maximum, Logue said. The military would like to extend that window of detection beyond that in case an exposure occurs in a remote area, for example.

"The perfect metabolite would be one that stays around for a long time. You can either look for a metabolite like that, or you can look for a matrix that preserves the metabolite," Logue said. "Hair may be that matrix. It may preserve these chemical warfare agent markers or metabolites in the hair for long, long periods of time. That's the hypothesis here."

The project looks first at whether chemical warfare agent metabolites get trapped in the hair, and then determine whether scientists can extract those metabolites from the hair not just from the scalp, but from anywhere on a person's body and do an analysis to learn whether a person was exposed.

Logue said detecting whether someone was exposed to a particular chemical warfare agent can help doctors with treatment. Better tools to detect exposure can also set others' minds at ease if science can determine they were not exposed. Finally, better tools to detect chemical warfare agents can help in legal cases against those who use chemical warfare agents.

Logue came to his research topic because of his active duty experience in the U.S. Army. He spent two years as a platoon leader, deploying to Middle East about a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as part of a biodefense unit. He spent nine months there, then returned to finish out his military service as a captain at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Chemical Defense.

The SDSU study can have immediate, practical benefits for soldiers as well as civilians, Logue said.

South Dakota State University
Communications Media Center 105
Brookings, SD 57006
United States
http://www.sdstate.edu

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