This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Matt Scullion was one of 37 employees at Idaho Technology when an anthrax-laced letter was mailed to the nation's Capitol shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center.
Five years later, the Salt Lake City-based molecular biology business has added 125 more employees to its roster. Crowded into two buildings - one at the University of Utah Research Park and another downtown - employees are researching, manufacturing and marketing hand-held and desktop instruments that can quickly detect an array of deadly pathogens.
Scullion understands the importance of his work in a world that requires American soldiers and first responders to conduct on-the-spot analysis of hundreds of lethal microbes associated with infectious diseases and biowarfare agents.
"It's all about speed," said Scullion, who was a lab assistant about the time the anthrax-filled letter was delivered to the Hart Senate Office Building in October 2001.
Scullion wound up working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the initial investigation of the attack. Veterinarians were the experts most familiar with anthrax, a pathogen found naturally in the soil. The infectious disease was common to cattle, sheep and goats before it became a bioterrorist weapon.
He went on to New York City to work with police investigating more anthrax-filled letters mailed to the New York Post and other media outlets. The crime, still unsolved, killed five people and sickened 17 others.
The "gold standard" in looking for deadly bugs is the culture test, says Scullion, now the company's marketing manger of applied science. The excruciatingly slow process revolves around a petri dish, named for German bacteriologist Julius Petri who invented it in 1877.
"Culture work is where you grow the bug up to point where the concentration is high enough to see it, and that takes two to five days," said Scullion. With pathogens such as E. coli, recently found in fresh bagged spinach, "we can shrink that time down to three hours."
Idaho Technology's hand-held RAZOR battery-powered instrument with built-in analysis and detection software can spew out positive results of potential threats automatically. There's also its RAPID system, a fully-contained, portable laboratory the size of a small suitcase that can mix and match tests as well as identify the presence of biological weapons.
In 2003, the company won a contract to provide RAPIDs to all branches of the U.S. military. It is now the standard instrument for the U.S. Department of Defense, or in Scullion's folksy comparison, "we're like the M-16s for biowarfare detection."
The company also markets kits to clean and prepare samples before substances can be analyzed in its RAZOR and RAPID instruments. One kit allows technicians to extract and purify suspicious substances, while another contains a freeze-dried substance used in a chemical reaction to detect and analyze the samples.
Idaho Technology's story began in the 1980s when company co-founder Carl Wittwer, then a graduate student at Utah State University, hired student Kirk Ririe as an undergraduate research technician. Wittwer eventually accepted a research position at the University of Utah while Ririe took over the management of Agparts, his father's potato equipment company in Idaho Falls, Idaho. It was in the corner of the factory that the first rapid detection prototypes were built.
By 1997 the company licensed its LightCycler System to Roche Diagnostics, a multinational diagnostic firm that manufactures and markets the product. The system is used worldwide in hospital laboratories and medical research institutions to detect infectious agents and genetic diseases. Sales are in the tens of millions of dollars, company officials say.
After the privately held company relocated to Salt Lake City in 1999, Idaho Technology employees worked with the U. to continue streamlining techniques to amplify DNA, making it easier and faster to identify and detect dangerous substances.
Common laboratory analysis takes hours, using a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique in which a specific region of DNA molecules are copied until they show up when tested.
"We believe the best defense against disease is a system combining rapid and specific detection of germs, and global monitoring of their spread," company president Ririe said in a statement. "When the system is in place, the defensive weapons of prevention, drugs and other therapies will save lives otherwise lost in terrorist attacks or natural epidemics."
About the rapid detection process
* DNA melting is the key concept involved.
* Machines cycle temperatures up and down 45 times in less than 20 minutes, doubling tiny DNA quantities. Each molecule, doubled 45 times, adds up to one billion molecules.
* The sample can then be analyzed by injecting fluorescent dyes and looking at the spectral response, or how it reflects energy.
* The process doesn't involve sequencing DNA, which is time consuming, but instead compares a known substance to an unknown sample to see if there's a match.
Source: Idaho Technology and Nicole Toomey Davis, director of the state's Centers of Excellence Program