http://www.austin360.com/aas/attack/100901/10biofare.html

Fighting anthrax

UT researchers close in on antidote to anthrax toxin

By Sharon Jayson

American-Statesman Staff

Wednesday, October 10, 2001

University of Texas researchers think they might be within weeks of confirming the discovery of an antidote to the anthrax toxin.

"We need to do a second round of experiments to declare victory," said Brent Iverson, a UT professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

For the past five years, researchers in the UT lab supervised by Iverson and colleague George Georgiou have searched for ways to defend against biological and chemical warfare. And now they think they may have found a key in fighting the anthrax bacteria, which produces the toxin in humans and animals.

"What they've demonstrated is that they can give a certain amount of the toxin to mice, and it will kill them all in very short period of time. If they give mice the antibody to the anthrax toxin, you can make all of those animals survive. That's a big deal," said Steve Kornguth, who directs UT's Biological and Chemical Countermeasures Program.

But it will take time to determine whether this will be useful for humans.

"Any product used in humans must go through a long process of approval," Georgiou said. "It's a question of translating laboratory research to something that could be used for human therapy."

Kornguth said the discovery, though not finalized, appears to be a major advance on several fronts:

• Large amounts of effective antibodies could be produced in a short period of time (three to five days, compared with weeks or months for technologies used now).

• The antibodies seem to bind much more closely than antibodies normally do and are more effective because they act more quickly in the body, giving it more time to fight off the toxin.

• The process used in this discovery could be used to produce new antibodies against viruses such as Ebola and plague.

"This is a major breakthrough in process and will teach us to make antibodies against many different agents," Kornguth said.

The work is part of a national effort that includes several UT System campuses, Texas Tech and the University of South Florida. The national consortium is working on ways to counter biological and chemical threats, with teams at each location working on different aspects in the fight against germ warfare.

"It's not just an early warning device or detection molecules," said Iverson. "We're looking at biological warfare defense from the point of view of every piece involved, from the technology all the way to the medical response."

Other universities, including Johns Hopkins and Cornell, also have federal contracts to work on such protection. Kornguth spent 40 years at the University of Wisconsin leading similar efforts before moving to Austin three years ago. He said the effort he's coordinating is a bit unusual because it brings together an array of disciplines and institutions sharing information and working for the same outcome.

With $5 million a year from the U.S. Department of Defense, UT is funding related research efforts by the Texas Department of Health and the City of Austin's Office of Emergency Management. In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Kornguth said his group is asking for additional money to move its efforts more quickly and has taken steps to speed up data input. Also, he said, the group has met with officials from the FBI and the National Guard.

"These people are always hard workers, but what is different is the intensity of the recognition of a threat and that it is a here-and-now problem," he said. "It's not an academic problem anymore. It's meeting national needs, and that came across very quickly."

In developing the technology for a better, faster and cheaper way of making antibodies, Georgiou and Iverson's lab uses a $100,000 machine called a fluorescence activated cell sorter. The machine can sort a sample of 10 million cells in an hour and determine which ones will interact with the biological agents they're seeking.

"We've so far tested rats that have been injected with the toxin directly but have not been infected with the live anthrax," Iverson said. "That's the next and last step."

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