NTI - Global Security Newswire, 1 Mar 2010.

Scientists at two U.S. universities have made progress in the search for a countermeasure for the toxin that causes botulism, which has been identified as a major biological weapons threat, Tufts University announced last week.

Scientists from the Massachusetts institution and Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia have developed a new way of cleansing the body of botulinum toxins that involves sending out binding agents that search for and then attach to the toxins. Each agent carries a shared "tag" that signals to a single matched antibody to join it and encircle the botulinum molecule. Once that occurs, the toxin is expelled from the body though the liver before it can cause damage.

Botulinum toxins are approximately 100 billion times more poisonous than cyanide. Research indicates that a single gram of the material could cause the death of more than 1 million people, according to a Tufts release. While there already are antitoxin treatments for botulism, they are expensive to produce, store, and transfer and do not have a long shelf life, the university said.

"We've proven this approach to protect against botulinum intoxication in mice and we hope this will lead to rapid development and deployment of many new anti-toxin therapies -- for botulism and beyond," said Tufts biomedical professor Charles Shoemaker, who authored a study on his team's findings, in released comments.

The new antitoxin strategy would require only the development of new binding agents and not new antibodies. This could result in new antitoxin treatments for a large variety of poisons such as animal venom and ricin, researchers say.

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