Fighting the Microscopic Enemy

In deploying to the four corners of the Earth, the U.S. military faces enemies that can’t be seen with the naked eye—microbes and toxins—that are every bit as dangerous as opponents carrying rifles and explosives. Some of these hidden enemies could be there deliberately, introduced to the battlespace through a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) attack by a determined foe. Others are there simply as a normal part of the environment in that part of the world, but alien to the U.S. warfighter. Either way, these unseen warriors can be debilitating, or even fatal, to our servicemen and women if not detected—and detected quickly.

For the doctors and other personnel tasked with this aspect of force protection, their dilemma ranges from one extreme to the other, from “Where can we get equipment to test for this threat?” all the way to “Which of these devices will give us accurate results in the time frame required?” In the field, medical and scientific staff members don’t have the time to come up with their own solutions.

Neither do they have the resources to evaluate various alternatives until they find the piece of technology or equipment that works better than all the rest. Their field commanders need results, and they need them now.

Fortunately, several support organizations have been stood up within the military community to address these concerns. One of the most prominent is the Air Force’s Applied Technology Center (ATC), currently located at Brooks City-Base, Texas. The ATC operates under the Public Health and Preventive Medicine Department of the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine (USAFSAM), a unit of the 711th Human Performance Wing headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.

The ATC’s mission is to provide continual and rapid evaluation, validation and transition assistance of new off-the-shelf technologies, and identify emerging technologies (“technology discovery”) to fill critical gaps in force protection, rapid diagnostics, epidemiology and preventive medicine, including identification of CBRN and high-yield explosive threats, to meet Air Force global mission requirements.

To accomplish this mission, the ATC follows a three-pronged strategy: Perform rapid but rigorous (“fly-before-buy”) inlab analyses; discover, modify, assess and validate off-the-shelf and novel technologies and procedures; and anticipate and respond to new realities, priorities and warfighter threats.

Dr. David L. Maserang, chief of the ATC and a retired Navy rear admiral, summarized the ATC’s mission and strategy this way: “The work of the ATC is almost entirely related to the biosciences, in our case, the medical field. We’re constantly looking for that one instrument that will most quickly determine if there are toxins or highly pathogenic organisms that would do harm to our forces in an area.”

“In a nutshell, we are looking for the latest and greatest technology that can possibly fill the gap in what the Air Force needs for quick detection capability,” added Elizabeth M. Escamilla, ATC molecular biologist and project manager. “When we test and evaluate something, we give it our version of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval treatment, thoroughly kicking its tires to make sure it does exactly what it says it will.”

THE ATC’S EVOLUTION

Officially only five years old, the ATC evolved out of what was previously known as the Applied Biotechnology Center, but its roots can be traced back to its former parent unit, the Air Force Institute for Operational Health (AFIOH), which had the organizational charter “to enhance warfighter mission effectiveness, protect health, improve readiness and reduce costs, assess and manage risks to human health and safety, operational performance and the environment.”

“The ATC was created in response to an Air Force need,” said Escamilla. “If you go back in Air Force history 10 years or more, you used to have all these companies calling on our procurement people, making presentations and saying, ‘This equipment can do this in this many hours plus give you all these capabilities.’ Everyone would become fascinated and say, ‘Wow, we need 20 of these in the field!’ Then once purchased and put into use, these devices didn’t work as advertised, and the Air Force would be out millions.”

“Companies selling to individual commands was a problem,” Maserang continued. “Finally, in 2003 the secretary of defense’s office released a memo stating that individual military entities had to actually test the technology before they bought it. It was around then the Air Force decided, ‘Well, other groups have the capability of testing items before they buy them. We need something in house.’” “The ATC officially came into being shortly after that,” Escamilla said.

The ATC has a remarkable combination of professional talent and advanced equipment. The staff consists of a virtual cross section of the entire scientific community, including microbiologists; molecular biologists; health physicists; industrial hygienists; and environmental, chemical and bioenvironmental engineers. Within the center’s 10,000-square-foot, level-3 bio safety laboratory, the testing and evaluation (T&E) equipment is state of the art, with capabilities for real-time PCR-based testing, ECL-based testing, and high-throughput sequencing, among others.

“The ATC has been very well resourced by the Air Force, and we have provided the Air Force with a very good product,” Maserang said. “For example, in 2006–2007, we tested one device that the Air Force Medical Service was ready to trigger something like $2.5 million to purchase. We were unable to produce the manufacturer’s results, so the Air Force canceled its purchase. Consequently, we saved the Air Force $2.5 million.

We have also provided several analyses to the Air Force surgeon general’s Modernization Directorate to improve laboratory testing techniques, sample preparation and assay methodology clarifications.”

During its brief history, the ATC has played a vital role in many programs and projects that have positively impacted the health and wellbeing of the warfighter. One of the ATC’s featured services is assay development. The unit has successfully and quickly produced assays for applications ranging from food and water evaluation to testing for dengue viruses. Along the way, it has built up a sizeable level of proficiency in this scientific area.

Maserang said the ATC can develop nearly any assays needed in the field by epidemiologists.

“Obviously, the quicker you detect something and the more specifically you react to it, the better,” he said. “We want to go as far up the left-hand side of the detection curve as we can, identifying an organism as soon as possible after its release.”

One foundation of the ATC’s work has been the Joint Biological Agent Identification & Diagnostics System (JBAIDS), a suitcase-sized field testing laboratory that uses DNA technology to identify organisms. With JBAIDS, an ultra-clean molecular testing facility can be set up even in austere conditions with very little preparation. The ATC has extensive development experience with this mobile asset, enabling field personnel to conduct tests and produce accurate findings within hours to answer health and safety questions that used to take days to resolve (for example, confirming or denying the presence of biological warfare agents).

“We’ve worked with JBAIDS for years,” Escamilla said. “When using it, you have a little bit of upstream manipulation, but once you open the suitcase, the equipment is pretty much ready to go. You process a sample and test it, and then wait for the results, which can come back in minutes.”

Other notable projects that have benefited from the ATC’s expertise are the Mobile Molecular Testing Laboratory (MMTL), a level-2 and -3 bio safety laboratory on wheels that enables on-site identification of suspect select agents, and the environmental detection of Adenovirus- 14. The ATC is continually seeking to adapt or develop a highly efficient, microsensor-based device for microbial and chemical detection used to ensure indoor air quality and the security of medical and food processing operations.

But the ATC also gets involved with projects that are more recurrent in nature.

“Every flu season from every lab in the world, salespeople are walking in trying to sell the latest flu kits. This year, based on findings the ATC at USAFSAM provided, the Air Force surgeon general released a letter stating rapid kits did not work well enough to use and were therefore not authorized to be purchased with Air Force funds,” Maserang said.

PROJECT ORIGINS

The ideas for the projects undertaken by the ATC come from a variety of sources. In addition to requirements passed down from the Air Force surgeon general’s office, or from the Joint Critical Reagents Program, the ATC constantly stays abreast of the needs of AMC, ACC and AFSOC.

“We know what their deficiencies are and where they are looking for new technologies,” said Escamilla. “While we are attending meetings and seminars, we keep these in mind, asking, ‘Is there something out there that fits into this gap?’ We’re always doing a tech watch.” Other sources for project ideas come from private industry. Sometimes companies will contact the ATC about conducting quick proof of concept or military utility assessments for products they are developing. At other times, the ATC will approach manufacturers about a special adaptation of their products. This interchange has led to several successful joint ventures in which both parties have benefited. Occasionally, a project comes out of casual exchanges between professionals, as Maserang pointed out.

“We pick up some of our projects just chatting with operators,” Maserang said. “We will sit down with members of the surgeon general’s office or representatives from the MAJCOMs, just to see what we can do for them. One thing will lead to another, and pretty soon we’ve got an idea to run through our intellectual process to see if it will become an actual ATC project in support of those customers’ research and technology need.”

As the United States continues to confront the 21st-century battlespace, the ATC expects its role to increase in importance, and the unit is taking steps now to be prepared for these challenges. Presently, it is planning for its 2011 move to a modern, 24,000-square-foot laboratory facility, under construction at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. It is also anticipating a wider range of scientific and medical involvements, as the 711th Human Performance Wing responds to the Base Realignment and Closure 2005 mandate to “establish a center of excellence for aerospace medicine research.”

“Detection is pretty much the name of our game now,” Maserang concluded. “But in the future, we will also be focusing on public health. We can offer the surgeon general further work in the area of vaccines. We talk a lot about self-protection for an airman, Marine or soldier, but ultimately we want to provide an envelope of protection around that person to mitigate as much as possible in advance of the effects of the bacteria and toxins we are currently trying to detect.” ✯

Jay Marquart is a freelance marketing communications specialist under contract with Ball Aerospace and Technologies, serving the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

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