Dose contours for a simulated brachytherapy treatment

Success Stories--Los Alamos National Lab

April / May 2005 Volume 3 Number 2

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There are some things you just have to get right the first time. When consequences for mistakes are high, practice and preparation are critical. This is especially true when radiation is involved. Before any new nuclear reactor or cancer radiation therapy is used, the design is first tested extensively on computers. Transpire, Inc., of Gig Harbor, Wash., currently makes the most accurate radiation transport simulation in the world. The founders developed the core program, named Attila, while at Los Alamos's weapons program.

Attila started as very raw research computer code written by John McGhee and Todd Wareing in 1995 that could predict how radiation would move through systems. After they wrote Attila, McGhee and Wareing realized that the program could be used by all engineers to test the effects new designs would have on radiation exposure.

In 2002, after working on Attila as a pet project for seven years, McGhee and Wareing realized they needed to "take off and do this full time" if Attila was going to be used extensively outside the laboratory. The pair took advantage of LANL's entrepreneurial leave program and started a company. Within 90 days, they had hooked up with CEO Greg Failla, licensed their code from the lab and set themselves up for business with a local office in the Los Alamos Research Park, maintained today by McGhee. According to Failla, "We started our company with no outside investments. We were fortunate enough to get NASA and Idaho National Labs as customers right off the bat."

Very soon Transpire's team realized they had a lot of work to do. Said Failla, "All we had was a solver and a code to do preprocessing. If we wanted to make a commercially viable product, it had to be much easier to use. We spent the next one and a half years making the code easy to use."

Attila now interfaces easily with standard computer-aided design (CAD) programs, and Transpire is currently working on many important projects. With NASA, Transpire is developing lightweight radioactive shielding for the Mars program. With Pacific Northwest National Labs, Transpire is working to improve cargo inspection at the nation's ports under Homeland Security. With the NIH and M.D. Anderson Cancer Research Center in Austin, Transpire is working to improve cancer radiotherapy.

What amazes Failla is how far Attila has come in so short a time. "Here's this technology from national defense programs and we're applying it to cancer therapy and health."

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Data Mining to Detect Trading Fraud

A group out of Los Alamos National Laboratory had thought their computer models named Wisdom and Sense would allow them to predict commodities prices on the world's mercantile exchanges. What eventually happened, however, is their work formed the basis for fraud detection used by the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Wisdom and Sense, two programs licensed from LANL and eventually incorporated in Data Ventures, LLC, Charlotte, N.C, formed the basis for catching trading fraud because these programs find patterns. The programs were designed to look very quickly at vast amounts of data and very quickly find patterns in those data. A simple example is that when demand for oil goes up, the price of oil also goes up. Wisdom, Sense and their offspring detect these sorts of patterns with ease. Also, these programs find trades that do not fit the pattern established by the sum of all the other trades.

"In the case of fraud detection, you are looking for unusual deals," says Data Ventures President Terry Montgomery. "Here again, Wisdom and Sense see the vast amount of data and identify which trades are suspicious and which are not suspicious."

The programs work very quickly even though the number of trades made daily is large (about 300,000). According to Montgomery, the programs' speed is key to their commercial success. "We are able to move to an overnight response for the New York Merc and say —€˜these are suspicious trades' on the very next day. The exchange relies upon fairness. Trading companies have to know the deck is not stacked against them, that nobody is using the system to their advantage."

Montgomery praises technology transfer under Bayh-Dole. "The message I want to have is that there are some powerful technologies developed at Los Alamos. The lab is ahead of its time, and the commercial world comes along later than that."
Data Ventures maintains offices in North Carolina, New Mexico and the United Kingdom.

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A Quicker Way to Screen Compounds

Most medicines work by stopping an enzyme from working. The enzyme can be from a virus, a bacterium, or a person (if the person's own enzyme is doing something harmful). Pharmaceutical companies screen hundreds or even thousand of compounds to see if those compounds can be made into drugs. The only problem is that testing each compound against each enzyme can be laborious and the exact opposite of "high throughput."

At Los Alamos, scientists discovered that Quencher-Tethered-Ligands (QTL—„) could detect enzyme activity and be applied directly to existing high-throughput screening systems. To get the product ready for the market, the inventors formed QTL Biosystems, LLC and licensed rights to the QTL technology in 1999.

The QTL system has advantages over competing systems such as antibody-based detectors and radioactivity-based detection systems. "It's a mix-and-measure process," says QTL's Dr. Sriram Kumaraswamy. "You incubate and read. It's a very simple assay format. No antibody or radioactive labeling is needed. [The QTL assay] can be read with a simple plate reader."

According to Kumaraswamy, having the QTL technology in the QTL company was critical for commercial development. "The technology was in a very premature stage when the company started. We spent three years applying the technology to solve a real-world problem." Now that the technology is perfected, the world's most powerful pharmaceutical companies are evaluating the technology for their own drug-discovery programs. According to QTL, companies testing the technology include giants Merck, Pfizer and Eli Lilly.

QTL is not sitting on its laurels and simply selling its technology for a fee. QTL is also screening drugs for activity against current diseases. "We applied this technology to the drug discovery process involved in Alzheimer's disease," says Kumaraswamy.

As is true of most biotech startups, QTL proved to be capital intensive and required two rounds of private capital to reach its current state. Unlike most biotech startups, QTL is on a fast track to financial stability. According to QTL's Tom Buscher, the company is on track to be cash-flow positive in 2005.
QTL, based in Santa Fe, N.M., recently received $3 million to develop a hand-held biosensor for the U.S. Army.

All Los Alamos vignettes were written by Jeffrey Stewart, a LANL business development executive for technology transfer.