thedrifter
06-18-07, 08:12 AM
Five years after attacks, a better anthrax cleaner?
By William Matthews - bmatthews@militarytimes.com
Posted : June 25, 2007
More than five years after the 2001 anthrax attacks, the U.S. government is still searching for a disinfectant that can reliably kill anthrax and other pathogens that might be used as weapons.
“We’ve seen many products” since the attacks sickened 23 and killed five, but so far none has earned approval as an EPA-registered product for use against anthrax, said Jeff Kempter of the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide programs office.
Now, a small Utah company says it has developed a disinfectant that can kill anthrax spores in a matter of seconds — compared with the hours it takes other chemicals to do the job. It is “thousands of times better than all existing products on the market,” boasts its inventor, sBioMed of Orem.
More startling, toxicity tests have shown the disinfectant is harmless to rats — an indication that it also may be harmless to humans. The company named it PeraDox.
sBioMed President Brian Larson said he is hopeful that PeraDox might be developed into a drug — Peracillin — to be inhaled or injected to treat people who are exposed to anthrax or other weaponized biological agents.
Far, far away
But Peracillin will require years of development and testing to win Food and Drug Administration approval. For now, sBioMed is focused on winning EPA approval to use PeraDox as an infection-control product registered for use against anthrax.
The Army tested it at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and found PeraDox to be effective at killing anthrax in a laboratory setting, but called for more tests.
A California firm, Pacific BioLabs, reported in April that PeraDox caused “no mortalities or abnormalities” in rats that ingested it.
Kempter said PeraDox is one of a number of new products the EPA is evaluating for use against anthrax and other deadly microbes. The agency is being “very careful to make sure the companies do all of the testing correctly,” and that the results are certain before the EPA approves any of them, he said.
PeraDox is the product of 23 years of experimentation with what Larson and his partner, Daryl Tichy, call “food-grade materials,” meaning they are safe enough to be included in consumer products such as toothpaste or mouthwash.
They won’t disclose the ingredients, but Tichy, sBioMed’s director of research and product development, said that about two years ago, “we hit on a combination that was a very effective disinfectant for vegetative bacteria. ... We tried it on bacterial endospores. The results were really quite dramatic.
“Typically, sterilants take on the order of hours to kill an endospore,” but the combination of chemicals in PeraDox “worked in seconds,” Tichy said.
That was on bacillus subtilis, a commonly used substitute for anthrax. Tests on anthrax itself produced the same results, he said.
“The world has long been interested in killing bacterial spores. It’s a really difficult task,” Larson said.
Only a few bacteria can form spores. When their life cycle is threatened by factors such as lack of food or change of temperature, they turn themselves into spores to wait for better conditions.
“They become like shriveled microscopic walnuts,” wrapping themselves in layers of coating to become almost indestructible, Larson said. Spores can lie dormant for thousands of years and then “come back to kill you.”
Mold spores found in Egyptian tombs may be the basis for legends about the curses killing those who disturb mummies’ tombs.
“You can heat them, expose them to the harshest chemicals, and they do not easily die,” Larson said. “That’s why a spore is such an exciting microbe” for those who seek to create biological weapons.
Before the 2001 anthrax attacks, bioterrorism experts believed that decontaminating a building or large urban area of anthrax spores “was not a viable option,” says an EPA report on the cleanups.
Cleanups at a Senate office building, several postal facilities and other U.S. government and private office buildings showed that decontamination is possible, but it is time-consuming and costly. Clearing the Senate office building of anthrax spores cost $27 million, according to the Government Accountability Office. Cleaning the Brentwood postal facility outside Washington, D.C., cost $130 million and took 26 months.
Larson said PeraDox in a mist, fluid or foam form could accomplish those cleanups much more quickly and cheaply. “And people can inhabit the building immediately after without any negative effects.”
For now, however, PeraDox is not available. sBioMed hopes to get EPA approval this year to use PeraDox for killing anthrax. Kempter says it may take longer.
A breakthrough
“We began experimenting with different classes of disinfectant in 1984,” Tichy said.
While conducting research on “modern wonder drugs” at Brig-ham Young University, Larson said, they noticed such drugs sometimes were nearly as harmful to humans as the diseases they were intended to combat. They set about trying to discover infection-control agents that would be deadly to microbes, but not harmful to humans or the environment.
They hoped to find “food-grade chemicals” that would disrupt microbes but not harm higher-order cells. And that, the duo says, is what they have done.
Richard Robison, a microbiology and molecular biology professor at Brigham Young, has tested PeraDox and says it works. Over about 10 years, Robison said, Tichy and Larson enlisted him to test various disinfectants they developed.
Most were “fairly unremarkable,” he said. “But a couple of years ago, they brought me stuff that had very rapid sporicidal activity — much faster than a lot of the common sporicides out on the market. As we did more and more testing, we confirmed that we were able to kill over 10 million spores in less than a minute. For a lot of disinfectants, that would take six to eight hours.
“I thought ‘this has got to be as toxic as can be,’ but I saw a toxicology report from a lab in California, and it says it is basically nontoxic,” Robison said.
Tichy and Larson won’t disclose much about the chemical mix they have created, but they say that:
•PeraDox kills by interrupting microbes’ metabolic processes. It might prevent some microbes from metabolizing oxygen. For others, it dissolves cell walls.
•PeraDox is a mixture of two substances that are stored separately until used.
• It would take “a gallon or two” to decontaminate an average-size office.
•It works against anthrax, brucellosis, plague and tularemia.
In a company white paper, sBioMed says PeraDox is promising as an infection-control agent for use in medical facilities such as hospitals and clinics; for disinfecting food-processing plants, restaurants and hotels; and for responding to biological attacks.
But the most valuable use for PeraDox might be as a drug, Larson said. If proven harmless to humans, it could become a drug capable of destroying viruses and microbes that have grown resistant to existing drugs, Larson said.
Ellie
By William Matthews - bmatthews@militarytimes.com
Posted : June 25, 2007
More than five years after the 2001 anthrax attacks, the U.S. government is still searching for a disinfectant that can reliably kill anthrax and other pathogens that might be used as weapons.
“We’ve seen many products” since the attacks sickened 23 and killed five, but so far none has earned approval as an EPA-registered product for use against anthrax, said Jeff Kempter of the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide programs office.
Now, a small Utah company says it has developed a disinfectant that can kill anthrax spores in a matter of seconds — compared with the hours it takes other chemicals to do the job. It is “thousands of times better than all existing products on the market,” boasts its inventor, sBioMed of Orem.
More startling, toxicity tests have shown the disinfectant is harmless to rats — an indication that it also may be harmless to humans. The company named it PeraDox.
sBioMed President Brian Larson said he is hopeful that PeraDox might be developed into a drug — Peracillin — to be inhaled or injected to treat people who are exposed to anthrax or other weaponized biological agents.
Far, far away
But Peracillin will require years of development and testing to win Food and Drug Administration approval. For now, sBioMed is focused on winning EPA approval to use PeraDox as an infection-control product registered for use against anthrax.
The Army tested it at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and found PeraDox to be effective at killing anthrax in a laboratory setting, but called for more tests.
A California firm, Pacific BioLabs, reported in April that PeraDox caused “no mortalities or abnormalities” in rats that ingested it.
Kempter said PeraDox is one of a number of new products the EPA is evaluating for use against anthrax and other deadly microbes. The agency is being “very careful to make sure the companies do all of the testing correctly,” and that the results are certain before the EPA approves any of them, he said.
PeraDox is the product of 23 years of experimentation with what Larson and his partner, Daryl Tichy, call “food-grade materials,” meaning they are safe enough to be included in consumer products such as toothpaste or mouthwash.
They won’t disclose the ingredients, but Tichy, sBioMed’s director of research and product development, said that about two years ago, “we hit on a combination that was a very effective disinfectant for vegetative bacteria. ... We tried it on bacterial endospores. The results were really quite dramatic.
“Typically, sterilants take on the order of hours to kill an endospore,” but the combination of chemicals in PeraDox “worked in seconds,” Tichy said.
That was on bacillus subtilis, a commonly used substitute for anthrax. Tests on anthrax itself produced the same results, he said.
“The world has long been interested in killing bacterial spores. It’s a really difficult task,” Larson said.
Only a few bacteria can form spores. When their life cycle is threatened by factors such as lack of food or change of temperature, they turn themselves into spores to wait for better conditions.
“They become like shriveled microscopic walnuts,” wrapping themselves in layers of coating to become almost indestructible, Larson said. Spores can lie dormant for thousands of years and then “come back to kill you.”
Mold spores found in Egyptian tombs may be the basis for legends about the curses killing those who disturb mummies’ tombs.
“You can heat them, expose them to the harshest chemicals, and they do not easily die,” Larson said. “That’s why a spore is such an exciting microbe” for those who seek to create biological weapons.
Before the 2001 anthrax attacks, bioterrorism experts believed that decontaminating a building or large urban area of anthrax spores “was not a viable option,” says an EPA report on the cleanups.
Cleanups at a Senate office building, several postal facilities and other U.S. government and private office buildings showed that decontamination is possible, but it is time-consuming and costly. Clearing the Senate office building of anthrax spores cost $27 million, according to the Government Accountability Office. Cleaning the Brentwood postal facility outside Washington, D.C., cost $130 million and took 26 months.
Larson said PeraDox in a mist, fluid or foam form could accomplish those cleanups much more quickly and cheaply. “And people can inhabit the building immediately after without any negative effects.”
For now, however, PeraDox is not available. sBioMed hopes to get EPA approval this year to use PeraDox for killing anthrax. Kempter says it may take longer.
A breakthrough
“We began experimenting with different classes of disinfectant in 1984,” Tichy said.
While conducting research on “modern wonder drugs” at Brig-ham Young University, Larson said, they noticed such drugs sometimes were nearly as harmful to humans as the diseases they were intended to combat. They set about trying to discover infection-control agents that would be deadly to microbes, but not harmful to humans or the environment.
They hoped to find “food-grade chemicals” that would disrupt microbes but not harm higher-order cells. And that, the duo says, is what they have done.
Richard Robison, a microbiology and molecular biology professor at Brigham Young, has tested PeraDox and says it works. Over about 10 years, Robison said, Tichy and Larson enlisted him to test various disinfectants they developed.
Most were “fairly unremarkable,” he said. “But a couple of years ago, they brought me stuff that had very rapid sporicidal activity — much faster than a lot of the common sporicides out on the market. As we did more and more testing, we confirmed that we were able to kill over 10 million spores in less than a minute. For a lot of disinfectants, that would take six to eight hours.
“I thought ‘this has got to be as toxic as can be,’ but I saw a toxicology report from a lab in California, and it says it is basically nontoxic,” Robison said.
Tichy and Larson won’t disclose much about the chemical mix they have created, but they say that:
•PeraDox kills by interrupting microbes’ metabolic processes. It might prevent some microbes from metabolizing oxygen. For others, it dissolves cell walls.
•PeraDox is a mixture of two substances that are stored separately until used.
• It would take “a gallon or two” to decontaminate an average-size office.
•It works against anthrax, brucellosis, plague and tularemia.
In a company white paper, sBioMed says PeraDox is promising as an infection-control agent for use in medical facilities such as hospitals and clinics; for disinfecting food-processing plants, restaurants and hotels; and for responding to biological attacks.
But the most valuable use for PeraDox might be as a drug, Larson said. If proven harmless to humans, it could become a drug capable of destroying viruses and microbes that have grown resistant to existing drugs, Larson said.
Ellie