After one of the longest avian flu outbreaks in recent history, researchers at Washington University have created a microwave-sized biosensor that can detect bird flu in dairy farms from a single breath. The device would help farmers target individual chickens to prevent culling the entire flock. Now, a St. Louis based life sciences company wants to commercialize it by the end of the year.
“That’s something which you know every five minutes, if you can get a readout, depending on where your instrument is located, and it’s a portable instrument, the size of a microwave, you can shut off that portion of the animal facility and just quarantine so that you do not have to cull out and kill all the flocks,” Head Researcher Rajan Chakrabarty, PhD, said.
“Right now, what’s going on is that, oh, there is a positive somewhere in the animal facility, and you kill all the chickens.”
The machine uses a wet-cyclone, a conical device that mimics a tornado by sucking in air at around 1000 liters per minute. The air is then swirled around at a high velocity, and conjoined with fluids that line the walls of the device. Using an automated pump system, the droplets are then sampled, and within 5 minutes, it can detect the presence of the virus.
“The challenge is that okay, in a room which has billions of billions and trillions of these particles, you know, other aerosols, dust. And these are all benign particles,” he said. “You have this one or two infected aerosols out there. And how do you kind of find that needle in the haystack?”
Now that the research prototype has been created, Charkarbarty said he and his team enlisted the help of Varro, a life sciences company based in St. Louis to scale the prototype, and help it hit the market.
Tom Cirrito, PhD, CEO of Varro, said the company is trying to find engineering and design firms to advance the prototype to a commercial scale. He said the commercial design will be smaller, but will have many of the same features as the prototype created by Dr. Chakrabarty.
“In the lab, it’s not like this thing’s going to get beat up, or anybody’s going to, you know, expose it to the elements or anything like that,” Cirrito said. “But obviously, those are the types of things in the real world that we want to make sure our device can endure.”
The prototype is also complicated to use, Cirrito said. The commercial product will be more user-friendly and cost effective. Cirrito said large poultry farms have been included in development conversations, and they are excited to see the device used at their facilities.
“This is not limited to the big agricultural companies.
The big agricultural companies are going to be big customers,” he said. “We’ve been having a lot of conversations with the big guys, but we are absolutely developing a device that can be used by anybody. I mean, a family farm could operate this device easily, and they’ll be able to afford it.”
Cirrito projects the device will hit the market within the next 12 months, because Varro does not have to rely on the USDA or any other federal agency.
But Chakrabarty’s team will grapple with funding issues for the foreseeable future. In January, the Trump administration signed an executive order to halt the funding of research projects across the nation. As the order has rolled out, Chakrabarty’s research has been on hold pending the approval of federal funding. His further research would expand into how many pathogens can be detected by the device.
“We are seeking out philanthropy contributions or funding to make this available to farmers and the animal welfare community, basically just prototypes for deploying for real world testing in animal farms, so that we get prepared for a next round of this bird flu,” he said. “It has been around since 2022. It does not stop.”