Application Spotlight: Tuberculosis Screening/Diagnosis

A particular interest of Livermore Instruments is the detection of particles containing Mycobacterium tuberculosis, sampled directly from coughed or exhaled patient breath. The difficulties in diagnosing the disease lead to a significant number of unnecessary hospitalizations and missed opportunities to prevent community-acquired infections. Evidence in the literature indicates that there should be at least 49 Tb organisms per liter of air in active TB patient breath. A SPAMS 3.0 can analyze one liter of patient breath per minute. Laboratory experiments have demonstrated the ability of a SPAMS to detect and identify Tb organisms sampled directly from simulated lung secretions including bovine lung surfactant and to distinguish Tb from other mycobacteria in real-time and at a negligible marginal cost per screening. Recently, Livermore Instruments has begun analyzing several strains of M. tuberculosis to verify that the marker peaks identified in the literature are detectable reliably across all. We will publish our results upon the completion of the experiments.

Read more about our technology in general in our technology section or about its particular application to tuberculosis in our literature section.

Livermore Instruments Inc. is a San Francisco Bay Area startup company dedicated to bringing aerosol analysis to nontraditional fields. We were spun off of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in mid-2008 to bring our technologies, developed for over twenty million dollars and the course of fifteen years, to the world. Our flagship product is the SPAMS 3.0 Single Particle Aerosol Mass Spectrometer. The SPAMS 3.0 sensor is capable of collecting and analyzing hundreds of mass spectra per second, each from an individual aerosol particle and analyzing the data in real-time to determine the origin and history of those particles.

Our technology portfolio, licensed from LLNL, the University of California, Riverside, the University of Minnesota and developed internally, includes field-leading aerosol analysis technologies that make real-time aerosol detection practical. We also allow the extremely simple collection of many mass spectra from real-world samples very rapidly, whether those samples are inherently in the aerosol phase or are aerosolized deliberately. Our instruments were designed from the beginning for ease of operation and maintenance.

SPAMS sensors have already been deployed to harsh environments including one experiment where 10,000 pounds of rocket fuel were combusted and another where 800 pounds of high explosives were detonated, in each case only 100 feet away. The SPAMS sensors continued to operate, collecting data in both cases. Prior to their commercial launch, SPAMS 3.0 sensors are being offered on a limited basis to the scientific public. If interested, please click here to learn more about our technology or here to contact us.