A team at the Faculty of Pharmacy is developing a system for detecting various toxic substances that can be used to save human lives and detect environmental pollutants. The scientists developed the system in collaboration with Oritest, a developer and manufacturer of products for the detection of the most common chemical warfare agents and toxic substances used in the industry, mainly in the form of tubes, papers and strips enabling faster, more accurate and reproducible detection of chemical warfare agents in contaminated environments. Jiří Zeman has received the MUNI Innovation Award for research in this area.
“Our research deals with the use of pharmaceutical technology methods in the preparation of carriers, especially what we call pellets, with physicochemical properties suitable for use as carriers of various chemical substances for the detection of chemical warfare agents such as nerve agents and phosgene,” explains Zeman, who is an assistant professor at the faculty.
In his research, Jiří Zeman is working on the preparation of carriers in the form of pellets that can be impregnated with the appropriate enzymes or detection reagents. These carriers are used as fillers in detection systems called detection tubes. These are relatively inexpensive, simple but very sensitive sensors that can be used to detect diverse chemical warfare agents. Unlike other, more complex detection systems, they do not require electricity or specially trained personnel to be used.
Depending on the type of the detection tube, substances such as phosgene, soman, sarin, tabun, VX and many others can be detected. Various industrial pollutants can also be detected, for example carbamate and organophosphate pesticides. These substances are often used in certain developing countries and can cause poisoning of local fauna and humans since their mechanism of action is similar to that of nerve agents.
“Even though nerve agents are banned, there is still a risk they will be used in localised military conflicts, such as the civil war in Syria, or in terrorist attacks or assassinations,” Zeman said, adding: “In order to save lives, it is essential to administer appropriate treatment quickly. For that we need quick, sensitive and accurate devices to tell us which toxic substances were deployed and this is what detection tubes using our carriers are for.”
The development of carriers for the detection of various chemical warfare agents has been a long-standing objective of the researchers led by David Vetchý, Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy. In collaboration with Oritest, they are developing ways to make the detection of toxic substances more efficient and easier. As part of a grant project of the Czech Ministry of the Interior designated “Second Generation Detection Tubes for Continuous and Repeated Monitoring of Nerve Agents and Other Toxic Compounds”, the research team has published a number of articles in high-impact international scientific journals. Thanks to their efforts, Masaryk University and Oritest have obtained a patent for a method of preparing detection tubes for phosgene and diphosgene.
“Cooperation with Oritest has brought us the opportunity to pursue applied research, which is extremely important for our faculty. The company’s researchers take the carriers we have prepared and test them using actual chemical warfare agents,” Zeman says.
A certain type of pellets (designated DT-11) previously developed at the Department of Pharmaceutical Technology is already used in Oritest’s detection tubes to detect nerve agents such as sarin, soman and VX. The company has been manufacturing and supplying these detection tubes to the Czech military, emergency services, NATO member states’ armies and other markets around the world.
“We obviously plan on continuing in our cooperation, because detecting chemical warfare agents will, unfortunately, only gain in importance as evidenced by the current geopolitical situation. These systems also need continuous improvement in terms of their sensitivity and accuracy so that we are potentially able to detect the use of even more potent chemical warfare agents that may emerge in the future,” Zeman concluded.