Dr Mike Kuhlman, chief scientist, and Dr Mike Dickens, business manager applied genomics, at Battelle talk to Gwyn Winfield about Fun GCAT, integrated forensics and massively parallel sequencing
Massive attack W
hile most people involved in CBRN defence are endeavouring to solve day to
day, or even week to week problems, many of the research laboratories are looking to solve next year’s, or even five years hence, problems. Sometimes you find research (and not necessarily basic research) on solutions that seem more like science fiction than today’s reality. Battelle is one of these government funded institutions, and is working on projects for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) (see interview pp.13) as well as forensic ones for other government agencies. A lot of these tend to be around
‘omics’ (proteomics, genomics etc), and what they are likely to achieve promises to disrupt the everyday work of CBRN and law enforcement (LE) officials worldwide. They range from projects such as integrated forensics, aiming to fuse information from current state of the art equipment to provide currently unavailable answers, all the way through to the ability to utilise massively parallel sequencing (MPS) to enable enhanced subject identification. Battelle has a long history in
utilising existing CBRN capabilities for forensic analysis. For the past 20 years it has been involved in explosives analysis, and for nearly ten years it has been involved in next generation DNA sequencing for human and microbial identification. This has been driven by $50m in analytical instrumentation and its CB labs and ranges. The trouble with some of this next
generation science is that at its farthest edges it breaks through the envelope of CBRN science and starts pushing the limits of other fields. Much of the ‘omics’ work that Battelle is engaged in is cutting edge not just for the CBRN or even forensics field but life science generally. As such, for a CBRN research organisation, it must become more difficult to remain tethered to one field.
Dr Kuhlman suggested that for elements of the work it was quite straightforward, as it was about utilising nascent technology in different ways. “The basic technology that has been developed is multipurpose, so we are bringing it to bear on the forensics challenges at hand. We pride ourselves on dealing with samples in peculiar or real world matrices, performing applied
science in a real world environment is what differentiates us from other labs.” Dr Dickens suggested that they were
able to utilise some of Battelle's skills and work in other fields to the benefit of CBRN and forensic science. “What is unique about Battelle is that we work in environmental and diagnostic fields, so we are able to see how technology works in all the different fields and how
Battelle has been looking at pulling target analytes out of complex substrates ©DoD
www.cbrneworld.com CBRNe Convergence, Orlando, USA, 6-8 November 2018
www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2018
February 2018 CBRNe WORLD
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