Device Can Battle Hospital Infections
Main Category: Medical Devices News
Article Date: 13 Aug 2006 - 4:00am (PDT)
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* MRSA / Drug Resistance
* Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses

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An innovative University at Buffalo air sterilization technology that
the U.S. Department of Defense is funding to protect troops on the
battlefield soon may be protecting hospital patients from deadly
infections, thanks to recent funding from the New York State Office of
Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR).

The funding comes as hospital-acquired infections, many of which are
becoming increasingly difficult to treat, are on the rise.

The $674,900 grant from NYSTAR's Technology Transfer Investment
Program will allow Buffalo BioBlower Technologies, the UB spin-off
company that licensed the technology from UB, to develop a health-care
prototype and take it into clinical trials.

"Receiving this NYSTAR grant is a major boost that will help ensure
the success of Buffalo BioBlower," said Robert Genco, D.D.S., Ph.D.,
vice provost and director of the UB Office of Science, Technology
Transfer and Economic Outreach (STOR). "We are very confident that in
the next few years, companies like Buffalo BioBlower and others spun
out of the university will make major contributions to economic
development in Western New York."

The NYSTAR funding will support construction of a test room for
evaluating a prototype for health-care applications.

The goal of the award is the development of a health-care division for
Buffalo BioBlower Technologies, potentially creating up to 100 new jobs.

In tests funded by the Department of Defense and conducted last fall,
the UB team has shown it can eradicate greater than 99.9999 percent of
the spores of an anthrax surrogate in an airstream, according to the
researchers.

"That's better than any conventional technology on the market." said
James F. Garvey, Ph.D., UB professor of chemistry in the College of
Arts and Sciences and co-founder and chief technical officer of
Buffalo BioBlower Technologies with John Lordi, Ph.D., chief executive
officer. Lordi is a research professor in the Department of Mechanical
and Aerospace Engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied
Sciences.

"We input one million live, active spores of a thermally resistant
bacterium into the BioBlower and only one live spore comes out," said
Garvey.

Through compressive heating and pressure oscillations that break up
and kill pathogens, the dual-use technology called BioBlower can be
expected to rapidly and continuously eradicate even the smallest of
airborne biological pathogens, such as bacteria, spores, viruses,
influenza including bird flu, pollen and mold.

That contrasts with the current conventional technology, HEPA
(High-Efficiency Particulate Air) paper filters, which trap large
airborne spores and need to be changed frequently, stored carefully
and subsequently destroyed.

"With HEPA filters, the spores are still alive, once they're
collected, waiting to infect somebody," Garvey said. "We kill them at
the source."

The issue could not be more critical to the health-care market.

"The Centers for Disease Control says going to the hospital is the
fourth biggest killer in this country," Garvey noted, because of the
high incidence of hospital-acquired infections, a problem that he said
is contributing rapidly to spiraling health-care costs.

In addition, the device could be made compact enough to turn an
ordinary hospital room into an instant isolation unit, Garvey said, or
as large as necessary to install in a building's HVAC unit to provide
purified air throughout an entire facility.

Buffalo BioBlower's administrative office is in UB's New York State
Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.

Lordi says that's a clear advantage, especially in light of the recent
NYSTAR funding.

"We will benefit from interactions with the researchers in the Center
of Excellence, as well as with all of the people in health care on the
Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus as we learn more about the whole
problem of infection control," Lordi said.

In Department of Defense funding announced last year by U.S. Rep.
Louise Slaughter, Buffalo BioBlower received $1.5 million to develop a
prototype for military applications, now being built in space the
company rents at Calspan Corp. in Cheektowaga, N.Y.

The system is one of a handful from around the U.S. that the
Department of Defense has chosen to test this fall as a candidate for
future procurement.

Other investments in the company and its technology includes $200,000
in original Department of Defense funding, matched by $50,000 from
UB's Center for Advanced Technology in Biomedical and Bioengineering
and $20,000 from UB STOR's Product Development Fund for studies on the
technology's mechanism.

University at Buffalo