Coronavirus Report: The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews David Talenfeld

The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews David Talenfeld, CEO of Botanisol Analytics.

Read excerpts from the interview below.

{mosads}Clemons: As I understand it, the innovation that you have created is basically a way to look at people’s cellular structure, to look at the cells with a system that can instantly tell whether they have been infected by coronavirus or not, tell us about what you have invented.

Talenfeld: Sure, well, I can’t take credit for the invention. That honor belongs to Tom Milster at the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. But the exciting thing about our screening tool is that it’s a small, portable, automated, single-button interface, easy to use by minimally trained professionals, and it requires no chemistry. It uses a laser to excite the molecules in the sample and then measure the unique signature of the virus in real time. It can go anywhere. There’s 120-volt power. It is very adaptable. It operates extremely quickly. We’re talking about positive results in as little as two minutes, negative results in under 10 and it can be updated in real time to look for emerging threats so it can detect not only COVID-19, but it could detect other threats and pathogens in the future by software update.

Clemons: Have you tried this system out with those that have been exposed to coronavirus or infected by it and those who have not? How have those tests gone?

Talenfeld: Sure. So, these types of systems have been validated in a laboratory environment. The technique involved is called surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. There have been over 19,000 papers published on this by leading academic institutions over the last 10 years. Our company will be the first to field this kind of system commercially. And we are under contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory, Biosurveillance Unit to supply these pieces of equipment to the National Guard late this year. And we will have participation from the military in supporting fast-track clinical studies with the technology.

Clemons: Can you explain a little bit more about how this works.

Talenfeld: Sure, what I’ll do is I’ll contrast this system with the current gold-standard testing modalities. … The current gold-standard equipment involves a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR testing, and also antibody tests. And those sorts of tests work very well. They’re highly accurate, but they generally require a refrigerator sized machine. They can’t leave a laboratory that has to be operated by a PhD and involves a lot of expensive and difficult consumables. So, one of the main problems with the current equipment has been that in order to respond to a new threat such as COVID-19, the design, development, manufacture and shipment of new consumables and reagents has been necessary. And that’s a several weeks to several months process, which has prevented us from having adequate testing to better prevent the human tragedy that we’ve seen play out. Now contrast that with our equipment: Our equipment requires no consumables, can be operated by minimally trained personnel, needs only electricity, is providing results in minutes and can be updated almost overnight to detect new threats. So, we can begin to imagine a scenario where, let’s say, a piece of our equipment is placed in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. A threat emerges in Wuhan, and within days samples are taken to be analyzed and characterized by our equipment. At that point, those digital signals can be distributed worldwide to all of our machines, anywhere. Places like airports, government buildings, schools, hospitals, first responders, you name it, and with a software update, they can now detect the new threat and prevent its spread. The use of machine learning algorithms also enables us to make important inferences about new threats. So, for example, should the virus mutate in some difficult way, our software is able to analyze that difference and suggest, “You know what? This is close to the threat that we’ve been seeing in the field, but it’s slightly different, and we may want to take a closer look here.” So, there are a number of advantages to using this laser-based technique. Speed, flexibility, ease of use, goes anywhere, it’s only about the size of a file box or a microwave, and it will get smaller and faster as we go. So, our long-term vision is to save and protect lives, as we like to say, anywhere the light shines.

Clemons: Is the world beating its way to your door to get these little gadgets? And are you able to make enough of them?

Talenfeld: Yeah. So, we’ve become very popular in the past three months. Fortunately, our existing military contracts enable us to rapidly scale up. We’ve received two tranches of funding from the Air Force. This is a credit, I want to give a special thanks to Capt. Steve Lauver of AFWERX at Air Force Ventures. Thanks to his support, we are now able to add additional national security users to our existing contract. And also, thanks to our scale up partner, we have an ability to produce up to 100,000 of these systems in 2021.

Clemons: How many does the United States need? Do you think we’ll be going through the kinds of screeners that you have now as part of our normal lives?

Talenfeld: Yes, I think so. We will not have the capacity immediately to serve all of these possible needs, but we are scaling up as rapidly as humanly possible. Let’s say we were to place machines in every international airport. We’re probably looking at at least 10,000 machines there, maybe more. So, what we’re doing is we’re focusing on the most critical-use users initially. So, we think that the highest and best initial use for the technology is national security, medicine later. But right now, what our military users are asking us to do is place this equipment around key personnel and critical infrastructure. So, the first systems will go around very important persons and also very important installations. So that would include things like, politicians, military chain of command, critical infrastructure, like power plants, for example. So, I’ll give you an example, something like a nuclear power plant. If it were to go down due to the entirety of the staff becoming severely ill at the same time, it would cripple the ability of first responders in the vicinity of the power plant to use all the electronic equipment that they have.

* The technology described in this interview is still in development and is not commercially available. Two systems are being developed by Botanisol for the military. One is scheduled for validation for the National Guard. The other was invented by Tom Milster and is under development at the University of Arizona. It has the potential to be thousands of times better than the current equipment.