Next Generation Biological Identification System for Bio-Threat Detection

Battelle’s REBS (Resource Effective Bio identification System) represents a major breakthrough in biological defence. It’s a highly cost-efficient system providing unprecedented accuracy, reliability, and flexibility across applications.

Challenge

The first and most critical step is detecting and identifying such pathogens. But this is a challenge that conventional solutions have been unable to meet, for a number of reasons – most notably, their inability to identify more than a handful of pathogens, their unacceptably high false-positive rates, and their need for costly consumables that make continuous monitoring unaffordable.

The Solution: REBS

REBS is a fully automated solution that overcomes these challenges and more, all without expensive liquid reagents requiring cold storage logistics. With leapfrog improvements in technology, it’s able to detect, identify and enumerate hundreds of biological and pathogens.

Accurate

REBS continuously collects samples and automatically analyses the environment for pathogens ranging from bacteria, viruses and toxins and even mixed threats. By combining patented aerosol collection and optical spectroscopy, REBS accomplishes this with new levels of accuracy, sensitivity, and speed, as well as near-zero false alarms. The REBS performance has been demonstrated in multiple government and independent trials with “live” biological agents and with agent simulants in realistic environments including an extended operation in the Boston subway. A government test with selected biological agents reported an average REBS probability of identification of 150 PPL for bacteria, 130 PPL for toxins, 190 PPL for viruses, with a 22 minute average time to alarm for all targets. Similar results have been obtained for other threats.

Fast and Flexible

Out of the box, REBS is capable of identifying over hundreds of pathogens in less than 30 minutes. Its architecture accommodates remote addition of new threats via simple software updates achievable. And an optional liquid-sample processing mode is available for analysis of aqueous solutions. REBS also offers flexibility even after it has identified a pathogen. Its non-destructive analysis and automatic archiving capabilities support seamless integration into high-level biosurveillance operations for confirmatory, diagnostic and attribution analyses. This means that the samples it collects can be further analyzed to support attribution and medical diagnostic efforts.