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"The U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency issued a request on Wednesday for information on the development of a handheld device that could be used by front-line soldiers to identify and characterize biothreats and disease agents.<br /> <br />The information request, released by the agency's Joint Program Manager - Transformational Medical Technologies division, is meant to protect deployed military forces from emerging infectious diseases and biological warfare agents that could result from bioterrorism attacks.<br /> <br />The request is seeking information on existing technologies, including pathogen identification and characterization, chemical agent identification and sample preparation prior to analysis on a handheld device in an end-to-end, integrated system. Officials are only interested in technologies that have already been developed to the stage of a working prototype.<br /> <br />The prototype should be lightweight, easy-to-use and should include a handheld bio-identification system that will help those on the front-line to identify and characterize pathogens found in a sample. Military officials deem the importance of identifying bio-warfare and infectious disease agents above that of identifying chemical agents and biological toxins.<br /> <br />The component that prepares the samples must be combined with the handheld bio-identifier and must be reliable for front-line operations of the military. The process from the beginning to the end of analysis should take less than one hour."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://bioprepwatch.com/stories/510508613-dtra-issues-request-for-handheld-biothreat-detector>