Imagine at your annual physical, the doctor asks you to breathe into a device the size of a cell phone that can diagnose any number of diseases you might be harboring.

Environmental Studies Professor Ed Overton with parts to a miniature gas chromatograph now under development. Photo credit: Jason Peak

Sound space-age? This is one of the many future applications Environmental Studies Professor Ed Overton has in mind for the handheld gas chromatograph device he and his LSU colleagues are working on. “There is a reasonable chance that we can start detecting diseases by detecting the chemicals in our breath,” says Overton, who points out recent evidence that dogs can use their sense of smell to detect cancer. “Those are the types of things that are enabled if we have the analytical capability.”

Gas chromatography (GC) is a widespread technique used to separate and analyze complex chemical compounds from air. GC devices capture samples and run them through heated columns that separate their chemical components. An attached computer system then processes the data, providing the user with critical information. Older GC devices are as large as a dorm room fridge, and are best kept in the lab, as they require substantial power, compressed gases and generate a lot of heat. Smaller, lighter units promise a range of new applications.

Your doctor’s handheld sniffer may still be years away, but a shoebox-sized model designed to diagnose the health of the environment is available today.

Responding to the need for a more portable chromatograph that can operate outside the lab, a team including Overton, CAMD Director of Microfabrication Jost Goettert, and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Michael C. Murphy, spent more than eight years developing the microFAST GC, which is now a commercial product. Weighing only twelve pounds, microFAST GC can easily be taken on the road, creating a mobile mini-lab.

So far, the benefit of the machine is being proven in various government agencies, as well as in the shipping and food industries. “Our biggest single customer is a company in France that makes what they call an electronic nose.” The French model, called Hercules, makes use of this advanced diagnostic technology to sniff out rogue components in wines and cheeses, helping maintain the high quality demanded by the connoisseur.

A contract with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration enables LSU to provide scientific support for chemical hazard assessments of spills on navigable waterways, so shipping concerns can assess dangers quickly, determining whether the substance spilled will sink, float, evaporate or explode.

And in 2005, when government mail in Washington D.C. was being irradiated in the aftermath of anthrax attacks, the microFAST was used to determine that several employees had subsequently gotten sick not from anthrax but rather from chemical reactions caused by the radiation. “Because [our device] is portable, we were able to deploy it in the Department of Commerce building, the third largest office building in the world,” Overton says. “Once the GC device determined the problem wasn’t anthrax, the apprehension levels went way down.”

A $2 million grant over three years from the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) means that someday soon, the LSU GC device could become small enough to be used on the battlefield, revolutionizing chemical warfare detection. “They envision something so tiny soldiers can wear it,” Overton says. “This would enable soldiers, if exposed, to know they must put on proper protective gear.”

While this high-tech application remains in development, Overton has been unable to lure a Louisiana-based company into mass producing the existing microFAST technology. The models currently licensed are manufactured by a firm in West Virginia.

This frustrates Overton, who thinks Louisiana can do better. While he acknowledges that working in micro-technologies can be difficult and expensive, that shouldn’t deter local investment. “Before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley,” he says, “the people there had to stick their necks out and take a chance on producing the new silicon technology. That’s how they got where they are today.”

-Renee Bacher

...from the Autumn 2008 Issue