Award Data

A continuing threat to U.S. military personnel and civilians is exposure to toxic chemicals and pathogens. While there exist methods and systems for vaccine development, agent detection, and assessment of exposure and immune response, it remains imperative to investigate next-generation technologies that have the potential to improve by an order of magnitude their cost, sensitivity, specificity, a ...

As part of its mission to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency develops and promotes innovative cleanup strategies that restore contaminated sites to productive use, reduce associated costs, and promotes environmental stewardship. Testing and characterization of the environment for potentially harmful contaminants is a costly endeavor. Current technolo ...

This Small Business innovation Research project will explore the development of mycofiltration– the use of fungal mycelium as a biologically active filter for removing pathogens from storm water. As pollution from pathogens is the leading cause of critically impaired waters nationwide, with storm water strongly linked to this contamination, this cutting edge research is a timely response to the ...

MicroEnergy Technologies (MicroET) in conjunction with ChemImage Inc. (Pittsburg, PA) has a goal to develop an efficient pathogen collector and detector that can be deployed as a point detector with few false alarms. During Phase I we developed a prototy

MicroEnergy Technologies, Inc. (MicroET) in conjunction with Honeywell (formerly Allied-Signal) proposes to develop a unique and revolutionary filter approach for actively removing hazardous (small particle) mists and toxic chemicals such as nerve agents from air. MicroET has significant experience in the development of microstructures for filtration and heat transfer. The combination of a micro ...

Foodborne pathogen detection has always been faced with volume and matrix problems, i.e., low numbers of viral or bacterial pathogens in a large volume of solid or liquid foods that are still potentially infectious. Despite sensitive techniques such as PCR and immunomagnetic-electrochemiluminescence (IM-ECL), there still exists a need to concentrate and semi-purify pathogens from large (liter) vo ...

During the anthrax attacks in 2001, investigators had difficulty in differentiating the strains apart because B. anthracis has a low level of genetic variability. This event demonstrated the need for rapid and precise molecular subtyping technologies. Lynntech proposes to develop an ultra-sensitive quantum dots-based molecular beacon fluorogenic reporter system to identify the presence of specif ...

Some bioterrorism agents cause disease at very low infective doses and their presence can be masked by the environment. Therefore, ultrasensitive detection is required for homeland defense applications. In this Phase I research project, Operational Technologies Corporation (OpTech) proposes to couple DNA aptamers made by the Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SE ...

Chlorinated hydrocarbons represent the most prevalent contaminants in the subsurface, threatening the quality of groundwater at aquifers. Existing technologies for monitoring these contaminants require expensive, labor-intensive methods of sample collection and analysis. The goal of this Phase I research project is to develop a low-cost, compact, reliable, automated, unattended, and lo ...

It is estimated that 144-189 megagrams (158-207 tons) of mercury are emitted annually into the atmosphere by anthropogenic sources in the United States. Approximately 87 percent of the mercury is from combustion point sources and 10 percent is from manufacturing point sources. The combustion point sources can be broken down further into four classes: (1) coal-fired utility boilers, ...