Industry, academia race to create drugs against biological warfare.

• Author: Beidel, Eric
• Position: Chem-Bio

Experts tend to arrange biological threats in tiers. And anthrax may very well have an entire shelf to itself After all, it was a series of deadly letters containing anthrax sent through the mail just weeks after 9/11 that spawned the biodefense industry as it exists today.

On the heels of anthrax comes a string of deadly agents that scientists also fear can be used as weapons and spread with ease. These include small pox, botulism, plague and tularemia. Most of the medical counter measures stockpiled by the government were engineered to combat anthrax and small pox. Scientists throughout the private sector and in university labs are racing to develop vaccines for the others before they can be used in a large-scale act of bioterrorism and before the natural consolidation of the industry whisks away funding opportunities for research and development.

Maryland's DynPort Vaccine Co. has contracts with the Pentagon to develop vaccines for plague and botulinum neurotoxin. The former is of particular concern because it is passed so easily between people, and the latter is "one of the most potent threats known to mankind," said DVC President Robert House. Botulinum neurotoxin can easily be turned into a weapon and used to contaminate water and food sources, he said. An attack with "bot-toxin" would have devastating effects far beyond the deaths of those exposed.

"It shuts down your breathing apparatus and it is necessary to use artificial ventilation and supportive therapy," House said. "While death certainly is a bad outcome, when people become incapacitated in large numbers it creates a huge burden on the healthcare industry. That would make us more susceptible to other diseases because now all of our medical resources are being taken up."

Plague, which wiped out a third to half of Europe's population during one outbreak in the Middle Ages, also is attracting the attention of researchers in academia.

Data released by the Army a few years ago showed that vaccines currently undergoing clinical trials poorly protected African green monkeys from an aerosolized version of Yersinia Pestis, the gram-negative bacterium that causes plague. The reasons for the unsatisfactory results remain unclear, making it difficult to predict whether the vaccines will protect humans, said Stephen Smiley, adjunct professor of medicine at the University of Vermont and corporate relations director at the Trudeau Institute.

Smiley and a team of researchers are trying to create a...