Sep. 4—Made in New Mexico technology will begin sniffing out airborne toxins this month in a test program at the Pittsburgh International Airport.
If successful, it could open the gates for a new detection-and-identification system to be deployed at many airports around the country, providing a unique, automated system that operates 24/7 to immediately alert aviation authorities about biothreats and significantly speed response times by security and safety teams.
It's a first-of-its-kind bioaerosol surveillance system developed by Albuquerque startup BioFlyte Inc. Once deployed, the technology could offer an unprecedented level of defense against exposure to dangerous toxins from terrorist attacks or unintentional incidents at highly populated indoor facilities, ranging from airports to arenas and entertainment venues.
It's already caught the attention of other airports across the U.S. and beyond, which are following the Pittsburgh pilot program to consider deployment in their own facilities, said BioFlyte CEO Todd Sickles.
"There are a number of domestic airports and one international airport that are interested in the technology and are closely tracking the program," Sickles told the Journal. "We believe once the Pittsburgh pilot demonstrates its potential, it will open up many other opportunities for deployment."
Pittsburgh International's security and safety management teams will decide whether to actually adopt the BioFlyte system after the test program, which begins in mid-September and will last through most of the fall. But so far, airport personnel are very interested, said Cole Wolfson, director of xBridge, which oversees technology innovation at Pittsburgh International.
"The folks in safety and security are very interested in the system's capability," Wolfson told the Journal. "If BioFlyte's technology can do what they say it can do — and all indications are that it can — then it's definitely a unique, forward-looking way to do threat detection. I think it's something that many airports with similar needs to ours would consider."
And, while airports represent a huge target market for BioFlyte's system, aviation facilities may be just the tip of the iceberg for potential wide-scale deployment in many venues to protect people and critical infrastructure.
Mail-screening operations in public and private facilities, for example, are a prime focus for BioFlyte. One large investment banking firm in New York City that routinely conducts mail screening has already tested the technology and is now deploying the bioaerosol surveillance units as a BioFlyte customer, Sickles said.
Still, the Pittsburgh pilot is critical for full-scale commercial deployment. That's not to show the technology works, because that's already been proven through extensive testing.
Rather, the airport program can demonstrate how to effectively set up multiple BioFlyte units in a sprawling, complex setting to detect and identify threats throughout the entire facility and integrate the system with emergency management response networks and teams.
"If we can do airports, we believe we can do almost any internal facility, so airports create a gateway to critical infrastructure protection environments," Sickles said. "That could include everything from arenas, cargo processing facilities and cruise ships to federal buildings like embassies, commercial buildings like data centers, or even an Amazon processing center. All those venues can be biothreat targets with major disruptions, and airports represent the complexity of those settings."
How it works
BioFlyte's technology is unique compared with other commercially available detection devices on the market today, because it's currently the only one that can simultaneously detect and accurately identify both biological and chemical threats. It's programmed to continuously screen for more than 1,100 toxins, viruses and bacteria — such as anthrax, ricin and fentanyl — and alert authorities with an accuracy rate above 90%, according to the company.
It's entirely automated to produce results in less than five minutes, said BioFlyte Systems Engineer Nate Jones.
"There are lots of technologies to detect things, but they can't necessarily identify them," Jones told the Journal. "With other technologies, you're unsure of what the substance detected actually is, and you need to send it on for further testing, which can take anywhere from two hours to two days. We have an immediate, 95% accuracy rate, which allows customers to make decisions and take action much faster."
The foundational technology that enables BioFlyte units to accurately identify toxins is not new. And it wasn't created by the company, but rather, by laboratory scientists funded by government defense agencies — including the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security — over about 25 years.
That technology, called mass spectrometry, measures the mass, or weight, of the molecules in a substance to provide a numerical marker, or signature, that clearly identifies what it is. To do that, the technology uses lasers to vaporize molecules into positively-charged ions, which then shoot through a vacuum tube, allowing the spectrometer to test how fast the ions move.
The vacuum chamber — called a "time-of-flight tube" — measures ion weight based on their speed through the vacuum chamber. Lower mass molecules move faster and higher mass molecules move slower. Then, that measured "time of flight" determines the molecular weight, or mass, to provide a numerical identification marker for the molecules.
Until now, the technology has only been deployed in laboratory settings, making BioFlyte the first company to create an automated system based on mass spectrometry for commercial use in public places.
The company, which officially launched in 2020, built an entirely new, compact system around the foundational laboratory technology, adding robotics to autonomously manage the entire process from collecting air samples to detecting and identifying substances. Its software includes an extensive library of biological and chemical toxins, with artificial intelligence and machine learning built in to rapidly identify substances and add to its knowledge base to incorporate new identification capacity for more substances as needed.
Those independently functioning units allow BioFlyte to take the technology out of the lab and into the field for the first time, said Chuck Call, company co-founder and former CEO who now serves on BioFlyte's advisory board.
"In the laboratory, it's really a clinical bacteriology machine where technicians manually prepare cultures and place them into the instrument," Call told the Journal. "Ours doesn't need a culture. It's designed to work on a smaller number of organisms and it does it all with robotics, not manually, so it can sit in the field."
Scaling up
Call originally began developing the BioFlyte technology through a Maryland-based company he co-founded in 2013, Zeteo Tech Inc., which also established an Albuquerque office. Then, in 2020, Zeteo Tech spun out the local office into BioFlyte as a separate company.
Since then, BioFlyte has won substantial capital from local and out-of-state venture investors, raising $7.35 million as of 2022 to finish developing the surveillance system. And, in August, BioFlyte closed on a new $5.4 million venture investment to provide the growth capital needed to scale the company from an R&D startup into a fully functioning manufacturing and engineering operation backed by aggressive marketing efforts in the U.S. and beyond.
"We're in a transformative stage right now," said Sickles, who took over as CEO last year. "It's a critical transition period to ramp up our manufacturing operations and begin fielding our technology in commercial operations."
The company moved in March from a small suite of offices in the BioScience Center in Uptown into a 5,300-square-foot facility in the Sandia Science and Technology Park. It also hired a new vice president of manufacturing to help oversee the operational scale-up and standardize the production and testing of BioFlyte's surveillance units.
The company has increased its workforce to 22 from about a dozen people last year and plans to hire more people this year and in early 2024.
Some 1,200 parts go into the wall-mounted sensors, including about 350 unique parts and some 100 custom-built ones from subcontracted suppliers, said Jones, the systems engineer.
"All the assembly is done by us," Jones said. "That includes lots of calibration and testing to turn the sensors into operational units."
The facility includes a dedicated lab to test the machines with simulants before being shipped to customers, said biotest engineer Christina Pattsalis.
"We do 'acceptance testing' with simulants for things like anthrax or fentanyl," Pattsalis said. "We release an aerosol into a testing chamber to make sure the unit picks it up and is fully operational."
During a Journal tour of the BioFlyte facility in late August, five units were in production, each one taking about three weeks to complete.
Some of those units are earmarked for the New York investment banking firm, which is now incorporating the BioFlyte system into all its mail-screening operations following a nine-month testing period that concluded early this year.
"We've just broken into the mail-screening market," Sickles said. "Some of the units we're now building will go to the current customer and to other large banks and investment firms. We're also targeting five U.S. government agencies with critical core mail-screening operations for them to evaluate the system."
Mail-screening is a primary target market for BioFlyte's surveillance system because that industry is huge in the U.S. and elsewhere and is particularly ripe for this type of technology.
"It's an obvious choice, because they already do various types of screening, like for explosives, but biothreat detection is very new for them," Sickles said. "Our system can help them look for, say, ricin, or anything else that someone might put into a package."
The company is now also working on new applications for its technology with modified engineering to design transportable machines for a variety of field operations, such as potentially inserting the instrument into government interdiction operations against fentanyl smuggling along borders or into prisons.
"We need to modify the system, but we're beginning those efforts now," Sickles said.
Pittsburgh pilot program
The BioFlyte system has already been extensively evaluated over the past couple of years in lengthy, onsite testing at the Pentagon and at the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate and its Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office. In fact, given the technology's biothreat defense potential, former U.S. national security adviser John Bolton joined BioFlyte's board of directors in fall 2021.
Pittsburgh International Airport's pilot program, however, marks the first time the system will be operationally deployed in a bustling public installation.
"Airports are large, complex environments where you have constant passenger movement and aircraft coming in and out," Sickles said. "It's a perfect target for a bioterrorist event, so it represents a tremendous use-case for our technology."
BioFlyte installed one unit last March within the airport's HVAC system as a "proof of concept" test for airport personnel, paving the way now to expand the program into an airport-wide pilot starting this month. The company will station multiple sensors and system triggers in key locations throughout the facility and integrate them directly with the airport's emergency management system. It will also conduct periodic simulated toxin releases to test everything.
The pilot will allow BioFlyte to design comprehensive "solution architecture" for total system deployment in Pittsburgh that can then be modeled for similar installations at other airports and public facilities.
"We've already completed the proof of concept at the airport, so now we're moving to test it across the entire airport complex," Sickles said. "The experience we've gained in Pittsburgh will allow us to tailor system deployment and evaluation in an expedited fashion at other facilities."
For the airport, the program could create an entirely new level of biothreat defense, said Wolfson of xBridge, which works with private companies to test out new technologies that could benefit the airport. Nearly 10 million passengers traverse the Pittsburgh airport every year, making it Pennsylvania's second-largest after the Philadelphia International Airport.
"There are no mass spectrometry capabilities for aerosols commercially available today, so we saw an opportunity to test that new technology to increase the safety and security of our facility," Wolfson told the Journal. "Safety and security are the No. 1 job for any airport, and if this technology can add a layer of detection and defense, it behooves us to evaluate its capabilities. This is all about being able to recognize potential threats and get ahead of them."
If Pittsburgh and other airports do adopt the BioFlyte system, it won't necessarily prevent biothreat events from happening, but it will allow them to take quick action in response.
"With immediate detection, there's a lot you can do with real speed, such as shutting down the facility's HVAC system or stopping an airplane from going out," Sickles said. "You can't stop a toxic release, but you can react quickly to manage exposure to people, reduce business disruption and achieve faster post-event recovery."
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