The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is conducting ongoing research that will help scientists better understand the coronavirus that causes the disease known as COVID-19, and methods to prevent its spread. In the Trump Administration’s whole of government effort, this work is being done at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) laboratory in cooperation with the DHS Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office. As results become available, NBACC will provide updates on their findings to DHS and response agencies, especially those that may immediately impact efforts to mitigate transmission.

“With this critical research, we are advancing the country’s top priority in helping to stop the spread of COVID-19,” said William N. Bryan, DHS Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary for Science and Technology. “This will help us understand many of the factors that influence the persistence of the virus on surfaces or in the air, and what methods are most effective for disinfecting potentially contaminated surfaces.”

There is currently only limited information available about the virus, so researchers at the NBACC are working very aggressively to answer the many questions experts have about its survivability and transmission. Using the lab’s unique capabilities, the researchers are evaluating the impact of a range of conditions, like temperature and humidity, to determine the virus’s survivability in the air, in respiratory fluids and on various types of surfaces.

The results of this work will provide essential information to protect those responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, including first responders and health care providers, as well as provide best practices for individuals to reduce potential for contamination. A disinfectant study will also provide information on the most effective materials to clean surfaces to rid them of the virus.

NBACC has a unique combination of capabilities in Virology and Aerobiology that operate together at high biocontainment levels, and its aerosol scientists can develop unique solutions to address complex questions, such as those posed during the COVID-19 situation. NBACC’s established ability to evaluate the stability of viruses and the effectiveness of decontamination methods previously enabled it to provide actionable information in mitigating spread of the Ebola virus.

NBACC was established specifically to conduct research for responses to biological events, to characterize emerging or novel biothreats, and develop response tools and information that enables effective responses and mitigation techniques to stem the impact of such events.

Southwest Research Institute has received funding from the Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC) administered by Advanced Technology International to develop a nerve agent antidote for emergency use on the battlefield or to protect public health.

The use of nerve agents continues to be a significant threat to both military and civilian populations. This prototype medication could serve as a countermeasure against a nerve agent attack. SwRI will lead the development of the antidote under the $9.9 million, five-year program, and will collaborate with University of Pittsburgh on the synthesis and compound design, through the support of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).

“This antidote improves on the current standard of care, importantly, its ability to reverse the effects of the toxin in the central nervous system,” said SwRI’s Dr. Jonathan Bohmann, a principal scientist in SwRI’s Pharmaceutical and Bioengineering Department. “The antidote will eventually be administered through an autoinjector, which allows for rapid and effective treatment in the field. It would work much like an Epinephrine Auto-Injector or EpiPen® administered during a severe allergy attack. The initial goal of the project is to support our warfighters; however, this treatment could also eventually be administered for civilian use.”

In the design of the new medication, SwRI will use a computer-based drug design software platform called Rhodium™. SwRI developed Rhodium™, a proprietary docking simulation software program tool, to enhance drug design and safety while reducing costs and speeding up development time. The Institute offers Rhodium as a service to clients.

SwRI is one of 193 industry, government and nonprofit organizations supporting the medical countermeasures sector in MCDC. This sector was founded to support U.S. Department of Defense needs in areas of infectious diseases, chemical threats and other medical countermeasures for military personnel.

SwRI’s Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division is ISO 9001:2015 certified, meeting international quality standards for product development from initial design through production and service. SwRI scientists supports drug development from discovery to clinical trials in, FDA-inspected Current Good Manufacturing Practice facilities.

Rhodium supports drug development and screening for antibiotics as well as preventative treatments such as vaccines. The software also predicts adverse drug reactions and side effects.

We’ve been fairly quiet about COVID here, largely because any reporting is quickly over taken by events. Scientific advice has remained fairly consistent, but how that is applied nationally and the impact of rising rates of infection is hugely variable.

The Editor was saddened to hear of the passing of Bruce George MP 

Bruce George Obituary

Bruce worked closely with the Editor when he was a junior member of the Editorial Team at Defence Review in the late 90s. Bruce was the Chair of the UK's Defence Select Committee and used to write a monthly column for that magazine. As a senior politician involved in UK defence in a busy time he was nothing but generous with his time to someone who must have seemed like a child. Always patient and erudite he was a fantastic example of a generation of politicians. 

PharmaJet, the maker of innovative, needle-free injection technology, announced that it received a $9.6 million dollar contract award from the Joint Science and Technology Office of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). DTRA, through the Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC), is funding the use of needle-free technology to further progress promising nucleic acid vaccines, while also funding the development of PharmaJet’s next generation needle-free devices. The initial studies underway are focused on delivery of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEEV) DNA Vaccines developed by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) using the PharmaJet systems.

This award is in response to the need for devices that can effectively deliver nucleic acid-based vaccines and are also compatible with military operations or a field environment. Traditional electroporation devices posed a concern to military operations because of their bulky size, need for power supplies, patient discomfort and device sterilization issues. The PharmaJet Needle-free Injection Systems are easy-to-use and optimized for field use. Multiple studies delivering DNA vaccines with PharmaJet systems have shown immunogenicity levels higher than with needle-syringe and comparable to electroporation.⁽¹⁾ The next generation needle-free devices will further enable the rapid development of nucleic acid vaccines and therapeutics.

Chris Cappello, President and Chief Executive Officer, PharmaJet Inc. said, “we are excited to be collaborating with the U.S. Government to progress their vaccine development and next generation needle-free devices, which could include variable dose devices for additional pathogens. Our systems are already being used extensively in the field due to their ease-of-use, minimal training requirements and fast administration time.”

 Nobio Ltd. and Supergum (1983) Ltd. today announced an agreement to rapidly prototype and test an antiviral protective mask, combining Nobio's revolutionary antimicrobial technology and Supergum's market leading CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) breathing protection products.

Nobio's technology is on the cutting edge of antimicrobial research, utilizing patented nano-particles to transform common materials into antimicrobial, indefinitely. Products for common dental procedures recently received FDA clearance. Supergum is the leading supplier of CBRN solutions to the Israeli Government and the Israel Defense Forces.

Under the agreement, the parties will collaborate to quickly prototype and test facemasks utilizing Nobio's technology, intended to protect emergency workers, medical personnel, high-risk population and others against various microbial pathogens, including the coronavirus (COVID-19).

"The ongoing coronavirus crisis requires industry to take aggressive measures to help public health authorities defeat this pandemic and make these critical initiatives a priority," said in a joint statement, Ilan Gescheit, Supergum CEO and Yoram Ashery, Nobio CEO. "Face masks with active antiviral protection are urgently needed and to our knowledge are not yet available on the market."

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) today announced the grand prize winner of the Escape Respirator Prize Challenge. Launched in December 2018, the challenge invited the innovation community to develop a compact, discreetly-carried escape respirator that can be used quickly for safe egress from smoke-filled, oxygen-deficient, and chemical, biological, and radiological (CBR) environments. 

Elmridge Protection Products, LLC, of Boca Raton, Florida, will receive $100,000 for its iEvac E700 Mini-ReBreather concept. The concept involves delivery of a controlled flow of oxygen from a generator to a sealed hood with an oral-nasal mask and integrated carbon dioxide scrubber. Meet the winner and here. 

“This competition presented a unique challenge to the innovation community to develop an escape respirator with specific design requirements,” said Dr. Donald Bansleben, S&T Program Manager. “Throughout the Challenge we’ve seen remarkable work from innovators to develop concepts for an escape hood that shows great promise.”

From the initial submissions, three finalists were selected and each received $50,000 to develop prototypes that were demonstrated to an interagency panel of judges in January. The judges determined Elmridge Protection Products as the winner. 

“In today’s environment of rapidly-changing technology, S&T is proactively looking for emerging technology to respond to homeland security needs,” said Kathleen Kenyon, DHS Prize Competition Lead. “Prize competitions spark the innovation community to think about homeland security as another market. We thank Elmridge Protection Products for their work throughout this challenge and look forward to seeing their technology as it evolves.”

In a follow up to the story we posted on March 2nd the National Police’s criminal investigation department (Bareskrim) in Jakarta have discovered more radioactive materials at the Batan Indah housing complex, one month after authorities made a similar discovery in the same residential area.

Brig. Gen. Agung Budijono, a director from Bareskrim, said that radioactive materials containing Caesium-137 and other radioactive isotopes had been found in a house owned by a late-National Nuclear Energy Agency employee identified as Gangsar. The house was now occupied by his daughter who knew nothing about the substances found in the house’s storeroom.

Bareskrim has named a Batan employee identified only as SM as a suspect of illegal ownership of radioactive substances following the discovery of the substances by the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency (Bapeten) in February. Not long after that, Bapeten and the police found late last month radioactive substances at SM’s house. Police found that the Batan employee had opened a decontamination service for extra income.

SM was charged with violating Articles 42 and 43 of the 1997 Nuclear Energy Law, which carries a maximum punishment of two years of imprisonment and a Rp 100 million (US$6,885) fine. (vny)

INOVIO Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:INO) announced today that it has received a new $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to accelerate the testing and scale up of CELLECTRA® 3PSP proprietary smart device for the intradermal delivery of INO-4800, a DNA vaccine for COVID-19. INO-4800 is in preclinical studies and is planned to advance into Phase 1 clinical trials in the U.S. in April with up to $9 million funding from CEPI. INOVIO plans to accelerate the testing and scale up of the CELLECTRA 3PSP devices to support large scale manufacturing of INO-4800 doses by the end of 2020.

The next generation CELLECTRA 3PSP device is designed specifically for a COVID-19 type pandemic scenario. It is a small, portable, hand-held, user-friendly device that runs on readily available "AA" batteries. This allows for stockpiling of the device in quantity without maintenance. It is easy to use and is based on our current device with extensive history (over 6,000 administrations) which has received the CE mark and has an acceptable safety profile. The streamlined design also allows it to be readily produced at reduced costs and large scale.

The device has been designed with reliability, challenging environments, user needs and ease of large scale manufacturing in mind. INOVIO's San Diego Device Manufacturing facility will build initial quantities and demonstrate the design and scale up of manufacturing processes which can then be transferred to additional contract manufacturers for increased capacity. Initial development of CELLECTRA 3PSP was started in 2019 with $8.1 million funding from the medical arm of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)'s Medical CBRN Defense Consortium. The new funding will help to accelerate the testing and completion of the device development and scale up to combat the COVID-19 disease.

Dr. J. Joseph Kim, INOVIO's President & CEO, said, "INOVIO is grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their continued investment in INOVIO's DNA medicines platform and for their support for DNA vaccines to potentially protect those at risk globally given the current COVID-19 outbreak. Our team of vaccine experts are working around the clock to advance INO-4800 and we look forward to attracting additional partnerships to expedite its development to meet this urgent global health need."

INOVIO aims to deliver one million doses of INO-4800 and devices to support them by year end with existing resources and capacity with the appropriate support from its funding partners. INOVIO also is working to scale up both INO-4800 and CELLECTRA 3PSP devices to potentially make available millions of doses to combat this outbreak.

INOVIO's DNA medicine platform is ideally suited to rapidly respond against emerging viruses with pandemic potential. INOVIO was the first to advance its DNA vaccine INO-4700 against MERS-CoV, a related coronavirus, into evaluation in humans. INO-4700 is the only MERS-CoV vaccine in Phase 1/2a setting, and INOVIO is currently preparing to initiate a larger Phase 2 vaccine trial for INO-4700 in the Middle East where most MERS viral outbreaks have occurred. These efforts are supported by previous CEPI funding of up to $56 million and from other collaborators and partners.

Biologists in Edge Hill University’s laboratories are recycling 100% of non-hazardous gloves used in vital and potentially life-changing research.

The achievement puts the University in first place in the North West with help from the Kimberly-Clark Professional™ RightCycle™ scheme, enabling scientists to correctly define waste to avoid it going to landfill or unnecessary incineration.

Lab Manager Matt Smith who is championing the recycling scheme, said:

“Here at Edge Hill University we pride ourselves in being a green and sustainable campus, and we feel that should be echoed across all departments. In the Biology department specifically, we have industry-standard equipment that students can benefit from and develop their practical skills. As a result of that, the student numbers have increased two-fold, but obviously the catch to that is the more science we do, the more lifesaving research that we conduct, the more waste we produce. One of the ways that we’ve been able to improve is via the Kimberly-Clark Professional™ RightCycle™ waste scheme, which essentially enables us to recycle all of our non-hazardous nitrile gloves, saving them from unnecessary incineration or going to landfill.”

Six months ago, all the hazardous and non-hazardous waste produced in the University’s labs followed the same waste disposal process, but since the introduction of the scheme, around 75% of all the labs’ non-hazardous plastic waste is being recycled.

The scheme allows those using the labs to easily define hazardous consumables and products before disposing of them in correctly labelled bins. Once the bins in the lab are full, they are emptied into a large ton-sized bag, which is then taken to a recycling centre to eventually be turned into long-life-cycle products such as planters, garden furniture and surfaces for children’s playgrounds.

Robert Hunt, Kimberly-Clark Professional™ Scientific Sales Manager for the North of the UK, said: “Edge Hill University is the first university in the North West of the UK to sign up to the RightCycle™ scheme.

“They have embraced the scheme, starting it very quickly and have already set the process up in the laboratories. It’s really great to see and they are doing a fantastic job and are already collecting the gloves.”

The scheme allows those using the labs to easily define hazardous consumables and products before disposing of them in correctly labelled bins. Once the bins in the lab are full, they are emptied into a large ton-sized bag, which is then taken to a recycling centre to eventually be turned into long-life-cycle products such as planters, garden furniture and surfaces for children’s playgrounds.

Robert Hunt, Kimberly-Clark Professional™ Scientific Sales Manager for the North of the UK, said: “Edge Hill University is the first university in the North West of the UK to sign up to the RightCycle™ scheme.

“They have embraced the scheme, starting it very quickly and have already set the process up in the laboratories. It’s really great to see and they are doing a fantastic job and are already collecting the gloves.”

Some of the research projects ongoing in the labs include the development of new antibiotics, the understanding of mosquitos as carriers of human disease and gene therapies in the pursuit of a treatment for cystic fibrosis.

Matt added: “We’re fortunate that in the sciences, everyone is like-minded; they’re interested in saving the planet, and they don’t want to produce as much waste, which is intrinsic to scientific research.

“I would encourage everyone working in a laboratory setting, whether that be a university or in industry to recycle as much as they possibly can. It is everybody’s responsibility to make that difference.”

Edge Hill University’s BSc (Hons) Biology course is accredited by the Royal Society of Biology, entitling students to a free, year-long associate grade RSB membership on graduation. To find out more about the Biology courses on offer or to book an open day, visit: edgehill.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/biology-and-biosciences

Coriolis µ is an innovative biological air sampler for bio-contamination assessment, mainly dedicated to air quality control and air quality monitoring in environmental and pollution research, the pharmaceutical, food and veterinary industries, in biomedical and health environments, and so on. Based on a cyclonic technology, combined with a high air flow rate, Coriolis μ offers the most efficient particle collection in 10 minutes. Biological particles such as toxins, viruses, bacteria, molds, pollens and spores are collected and concentrated in a liquid ready to be analyzed with microbiological and cellular and molecular biology methods.

Helping labs worldwide to analyze live samples & develop tests, drugs & vaccines. With Coriolis, collect all types of micro-organisms in the air to assure efficient measures of the emerging infection & get immediate results, collect viable virus & bacteria, use both indoor & outdoor.  

https://www.bertin-instruments.com/product/air-samplers/coriolis-micro-air-sampler/

The Department of Defense has awarded three teams, BWX Technologies, Inc., Lynchburg, Virginia; Westinghouse Government Services, Washington, D.C.; and X-energy, LLC, Greenbelt, Maryland; contracts to each begin design work on a mobile nuclear reactor prototype under a Strategic Capabilities Office initiative called Project Pele.

Project Pele involves the development of a safe, mobile and advanced nuclear microreactor to support a variety of Department of Defense missions, such as generating power for remote operating bases. After a two-year design-maturation period, one of the three companies may be selected to build and demonstrate a prototype.

“The Pele Program’s uniqueness lies in the reactor’s mobility and safety,” said Dr. Jeff Waksman, Project Pele program manager. “We will leverage our industry partners to develop a system that can be safely and rapidly moved by road, rail, sea or air and for quick set up and shut down, with a design which is inherently safe.”

In January 2019, SCO issued a request for information to industry for the development of Project Pele technology. Three companies were chosen from the ensuing competition to develop engineering designs. Critical to the Pele program is coordination with the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Nuclear Security Administration and industry partners that allows the rapid development of workable prototype designs that support evaluation, safety analysis, and, ultimately, construction and testing.

In order to technically assess the feasibility of a mobile reactor, it is necessary to complete a high-fidelity engineering design to confirm its safety, resiliency, and reliability, and to reduce technical, regulatory and manufacturing risks.

SCO, in partnership with the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy, has reviewed modern design concepts and cutting-edge technology which it believes enable American industry to meet the challenges required.

DOD uses approximately 30 terrawatt hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons of fuel per day—levels that are expected to increase. A safe, small, mobile nuclear reactor would enable units to carry a nearly endless clean power supply, enabling expansion and sustainment of operations for extended periods of time anywhere on the planet.

“The United States risks ceding nuclear energy technology leadership to Russia and China,” said Mr. Jay Dryer, SCO director. “By retaking technological leadership, the United States will be able to supply the most innovative advanced nuclear energy technologies.”

Microreactors would significantly reduce the need for investments in costly power infrastructure. In civilian applications, they could be easily relocated to support disaster response work and provide temporary or long-term support to critical infrastructure like hospitals, as well as remote civilian locations where delivery of electricity and power is difficult.

The engineering design phase of Project Pele will continue for up to two years, after which the DOD will make an assessment on whether a microreactor capable of meeting necessary safety requirements is feasible.

The Department of Defense has also published a Notice of Intent to conduct an Environmental Impact Statement associated with Project Pele in the Federal Register as required under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. The NOI can be found by visiting https://www.federalregister.gov/.

 As part of the NEPA process, the public will have the opportunity to review and comment on proposed actions, alternatives and the environmental analysis. The public, as well as federal, state and local agencies, are invited to participate in the scoping process for the preparation of this EIS by attending a scoping meeting or submitting written comments. DOD will host a meeting as part of the public scoping process to identify and determine potential environmental impacts as well as to document key issues of concern to be analyzed in the EIS. All meeting details and submitted comments can be found in the NOI listed on the Federal Register website.

BWX Technologies, Inc., was awarded $13,500,000, X-energy LLC $14,309,000 and Westinghouse Government Services was awarded funds in the amount of $11,953,036.