Applied Biosystems Makes $8.4m Sale to CDC

By Ross Kerber, The Boston Globe

Oct. 3–Applied Biosystems Group plans to announce today it has sold $8.4 million in laboratory equipment from its Framingham facility to a Centers for Disease Control threat-detection program.

The sale is the government agency’s largest purchase to date of the machinery that can detect dangerous chemical agents in the bloodstream released through terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents.

The equipment, mass spectrometers, is at the center of the government’s efforts to improve chemical, biological and radiological security. Similar orders have also boosted the sales of laboratory-equipment makers from Massachusetts including PerkinElmer Inc. of Wellesley and Thermo Electron Corp. of Waltham.

The machines the CDC bought were developed, designed and sold by a 109-person Framingham unit of Applied Biosystems, which is a unit of Applera Corp., of Norwalk, Conn.

Currently only a few state labs have mass spectrometers specialized for chemical-exposure detection. When emergency hazardous-materials crews can’t determine the source of a suspicious chemical, the CDC often has to fly blood or urine samples to its Atlanta laboratories on a special jet.

One such case happened last year when mustard-gas agents from World War I-era munitions turned up in Delaware in crushed clamshells used to pave driveways. The clams, it turned out, were dredged up from areas where old ordnance was dumped on the ocean floor.

The $8.4 million will pay for 21 mass spectrometers to be distributed to 10 states, including Massachusetts’ large public-health laboratory, in Jamaica Plain.

The CDC is looking for the states to function as “surge capacity” when many exposures need to be checked at once, said Robert J. Kobelski, lead chemist for the CDC’s emergency response and air toxicants branch. For example, in 2002, when a chemical plant in upstate New York spread a cloud of hazardous chlorofluorophenol used in making medicines, individuals in the area needed to be tested. A large state lab with a mass spectrometer did the job.

In Jamaica Plain, the state lab already tests for hazardous materials like lead or pollutants, and for a variety of clinical issues like food-borne illnesses or HIV. But much of the chemical-detection work it does now relates to known substances or to environmental issues, said Al DeMaria, the lab’s acting director. The new equipment will help it respond in cases where individuals fear an intentional release of unknown agents — the most difficult type of situation to respond to.

Mass spectrometers get their name from their ability to determine the composition of a substance based on its mass spectrum, the distribution of its matter according to its molecular mass — essentially creating a chemical fingerprint of the agent that can be compared to known type.

The machines work by breaking up the substance in question into fragments, then passing these through a magnetic or electrical field to select them according to type. The distribution of these fragments by their atomic weight, often expressed as a graph on a computer screen, is then correlated with known material.

—–

To see more of The Boston Globe, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.boston.com/globe.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Boston Globe

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

ABI, PKI, TMO,