Sykesville, Md., April 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Zeteo Tech, the biodefense and medical device company that has developed a revolutionary new class of fieldable biological mass spectrometers, today announced that it has been awarded a contract of up to $6.5 million (including options) from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop and test a new sensor technology that enables real-time detection of aerosolized biological threat agents including bacteria, viruses, and toxins. The contract was awarded in support of the Department’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T).
“We are excited to have been selected for this award to assist the U.S. Department of Homeland Security with its ongoing efforts to improve detection and response times to potential bioterrorism attacks or naturally occurring biological incidents,” said Dr. Wayne Bryden, President and CEO of Zeteo Tech. “Our team’s deep expertise with developing fieldable and real-time biological mass spectrometers is perfectly aligned to help DHS achieve its objective of protecting citizens and critical infrastructures from biological threats.”
DHS S&T is working to develop, test, and deploy new technologies that will decrease the time required to detect a biological incident. Current systems can require up to 12-36 hours to detect an aerosolized biological threat agent and are costly to operate. The sensor to be developed under this program is intended to contain component technologies that would have both trigger and detector functions, and improve current capabilities by:
- Reducing the amount of time required to detect the presence of a biological threat following release from the current 12-36 hour timeframe down to minutes
- Increasing the total number of biological threats that can be detected over current technologies
- Significantly lowering deployment, operations, and maintenance costs on a per sensor basis
“By combining both trigger and detector technologies, the sensor we are developing offers the potential for continuous air monitoring with the ability to rapidly and accurately identify biological particles indicative of a bioterrorist event,” said Mike McLoughlin, VP of Research at Zeteo Tech.
For more information about Zeteo Tech, please visit https://zeteotech1.wpengine.com.
About Zeteo Tech
Zeteo Tech is a venture-backed biodefense and medical device company that has developed a revolutionary new class of fieldable biological mass spectrometers. Its instruments identify airborne microbes, proteins and lipids, and can be used to screen for infectious disease and other bio-threats. Its innovative and patent-pending time of flight mass spectrometry technology, digitalMALDI®, enables fully-automated and near real-time identification of bio-threats in operational environments and dramatically lowers cost-of-ownership relative to the biomolecular reagent-based systems currently deployed for biodefense applications.
Zeteo Tech is backed by venture capital firm Anzu Partners, which invests in breakthrough industrial technologies.