SBIR-STTR Award

The widespread occurrence of PCDD's in the environment in combination with their significant toxicity requires a comprehensive assessment of their environmental impact. This assessment is made substantially more difficult by the fact that the PCDD's are a mixture of 75 possible chloro-substituted derivatives, the most common of which may not represent the most significant environmental toxicants. Consequently, there is an acute need for the congener specific analysis of PCDD's in the environment to evaluate their environmental impact. However, the effort and expense associated with the analysis of these compounds by High Resolution Gas Chromatography/High Resolution Mass Spectroscopy places substantial restraints on the required studies. Antibody based analytical methods have demonstrated the ability to provide for both high throughput screening and quantitative analysis. This methodology can provide for a marked reduction in analytical effort through immunoaffinity purification and/or immunoassay techniques. This project will build on ECOCHEM's successful development of a sensitive and quantitative Aroclor directed PCB immunoassay to develop antibody based PCDD analysis tools.National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)

Polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs) are significant environmental pollutants. Comprehensive assessment of their environmental impact is difficult because the PCDD/Fs are a mixture of 210 possible chlorinated isomers. Moreover, the analysis of the 2,3,7,8-substituted toxic congener PCDD/Fs currently requires the specificity, sensitivity and expense of high resolution GC/MS. Antibody based analytical methods have demonstrated utility for both high throughput screening and quantitative analysis of environmental samples. However, previous PCDD/F immunoassay development programs have not been particularly successful. There is a clear scientific, commercial and economic need for a sensitive PCDD/F toxic congener specific immunoassays. The goal of this project is to develop laboratory based immunoanalytical methods that can be used to substantially reduce the overall cost of PCDD/F toxic congener analysis. The goal of Phase I was to prove that they could develop specific and sensitive 2,3,7,8-TetraCDD directed antibodies. Phase I demonstrated this goal with the development of a Toxic Equivalents (TEQ) directed polyclonal serum based assay and a sensitive, 2,3,7,8-TetraCDD specific monoclonal antibody based assay. The Phase II studies will develop the full set of required PCDD/F congener specific MAbs and competitors, prove commercial feasibility through the market introduction of specific immunoassay products and initiate the development of immunoaffinity reagents and femtogram sensitive assays.PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: NOT AVAILABLE

Thesaurus Terms:
There are no thesaurus terms on file for this project.NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SCIENCES