A team of University of Arizona researchers has received $2.1 million from the U.S. Army to build a hand-held version of a biological and chemical sensing device.
“Military personnel who want to know if it’s safe to enter a room can see a red or green light response,” said the leader of the UA team, Judith Su, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and optical sciences, in a news release.
The device developed by UA researchers, known as FLOWER, picks up target compounds at highly miniscule concentrations, and the military expects it may “preserve the lives of active-duty service members,” the news release said.
It detects compounds at “zeptomolar (10 to the power of negative 21) concentrations,” an amount of 600 particles per litre.
“This level of sensing, immediately useful for drug testing and other research, has the potential to make new drug discoveries possible. Eventually, the advance could lead to portable sensors that can detect environmental toxins or chemical weapons, monitor food quality, or screen for cancer,” said a September UA News article by Chris Quirk.
Judith Su runs the Little Sensor Lab at the University of Arizona.
The researchers tested the device’s detection capabilities on “tiny amounts of airborne chemical warfare agents,” including “part-per-million concentrations of DIMP,” a highly toxic, clear, odorless and tasteless nerve agent.
They also looked at different chemicals, such as nitric oxide, ammonia and formaldehyde.
Different from other sensing devices, FLOWER doesn’t need compound tagging, in which a fluorescent or radioactive tag is added to make the compound stand out during testing. That makes it a cost-effective solution to identify gas particles on the go, said Su.
The device allows for early detection and will be more sensitive than anything the Army is now using, said Euan McLeod, associate professor of optical sciences and Su’s collaborator, in the news release.
“Being far away from a toxic gas, there might be a little bit of it in the air, but that’s such a low concentration that a normal sensor couldn’t sense it,” McLeod said. “This will keep people safer by giving them an early warning at a longer distance from the source.”
The research is in its second phase, after Su received $2.8 million in 2020 from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency for the first phase.
The goal of phase two is to create a prototype to take FLOWER sensors out of the lab and “to real-world chemical sensing solutions.”
“If you can make a portable sensor for the military, that can also be useful in hospitals or point-of-care applications at home if you want to monitor your health,” Su said in the news release. “With a handheld, you could just spit into this device, and it could interface with your cellphone to give a readout.”
