Transcript

Combatting Nerve Agents with Nanotechnology | Omar Farha | TEDxNorthwesternU

good afternoon and thank you for a very generous introduction actually let me start by thanking the selection committee for allowing me to be here today to tell you about some of the research activities taking place at our lab at Northwestern University but before I tell you about what I got to be talking about today those are the people who actually do the work as you could see from this picture diversity is really the whole Mark of our team and I'm so proud to be among those colleagues thank few colleagues who helped in the process to get here and more importantly thank my wife and my two children for being tremendous support in the last few years so today I will be telling you about harmful and toxic chemicals and these things are not new they've been used since World War I as you could see from these pictures protective gear have been designed and used by soldiers and even civilians to protect themselves and their animals in the last 100 years so you might be asking yourself why is he standing here telling us about what happened a 100 years ago what's all this have to do with what's happening right now if you watch a show called Homeland last season a CIA agent was able to stop a nerve agent attack that was going to take place in a Subway in Berlin Germany and again you have the right to ask the same question again first he's telling us about what happened 100 years ago then he's telling us about a fictional show what all this have to do with reality if you do a simple Google search you will find out that these harmful materials have been used several times in the past two years last of which two weeks ago against civilians in Syria so it might not be fictional anymore this is some people's reality so again it's not just using small quantities warehouses are found full of these harmful chemicals as well so why are these materials so toxic we all have an enzyme called aerolin esterase among its functions it allows us to control our muscles our breathing however when an agent goes and attacks that particular enzyme it stops it from doing its function at that point we have no control over our muscles no control over our breathing and that leads to death so the question is what's the current technology right now the current technology right now is based what we call activated carbons or charcoals most of us we actually have in our sinks or refrigerator filtering our water plus some other chemicals that means we could do better and that's what we do here at Northwestern trying to make the Next Generation technology to do better so here today I will be telling you about some technology that it has the potential not only deactivate and get rid of stock piles that we are finding in warehouses it has the potential to be put in those masks for our soldiers who trying to protect our Liberty to be put on the suit that our soldiers wear all the way to have the potential to be used as an antidote before even an attack can take place when I talk today about designer materials for a human protection I'm not really talking about this type I am really talking about what those guys wear when they go into the harmful places so what are these materials that we are making here at Northwestern University just just a block away from here in the building called International Institute of nanotechnology but before I tell you about these materials let me tell you some requirements for a material to be to go into a technology we have to make it simple but at the same time has to do this sophisticated task being able to stop and degrade nerve agents that's not a simple task however the material itself has to be built from simple components to be able to scale up into a real technology so the MTO on our team and our group always keep it simple the idea is how can we use Simple building blocks to make sophisticated material to be able to stop nerve Agents from killing us and at the same time to be able to scale it up and utilize it in the field so we all have either played or we know somebody who played or we all know Tinker Toys the cousins of Legos we buy them very simple components and in no time the fif year-olds the six-year-olds they build some complex structures the question is why can't we implement this simple concept into chemistry but now to build small tiny molecules let's call them Nano Tinker Toys but the way we want to do it we don't want to do it one piece at a time we don't want to just take those pieces and assemble it one piece at a time we want to be able to take all the ingredients the metals the organic molecules our solvent and make a soup out of it put everything together and allow it to be to come together in a way to make sophisticated intricate beautiful molecules but in a programmable way so we're not just going to rely on what God going to give us we want to be able to predict what we going to get before we mix those components in that soup and when they come they are beautiful structures as you could see different shapes here I'm showing in Gray but they are different colors as well so those molecules come very beautiful and very shiny but that's not where the action take place where the action take place is really down in the Nano regime the regime that we cannot even see with our Naked Eyes but let's take this Crystal and let's dive in into this inside this Crystal to that little tiny Nano molecule that's the molecule that we will be talking about for the rest of this talk so those materials have a tech technical term it's called metal organic Frameworks because they are built on Metals we have a whole periodic table to choose from they are built on the organic 200 years 300 years of chemistry so here the question is which one should we make because we have too many choices to build from so the idea here let me talk about one of those molecules that we made here at Northwestern University we call Nu 100 stands for Northwestern University this material one gr of it if you are able to unfold all these components and lay them on the ground it will cover the whole football field or a soccer field with one gram just let me tell you what one gram means it's less than one package of sugar that's how much surface area we have in such a small volume so that question is you might be asking and who cares let me use the air molecules that you are breathing right now as an example there is more air molecules in your hands on your skin on your face than in front of you that means the more surfaces we have the more gases we interact the more harmful molecules we could capture in a small tiny volume and that's the trick here so the idea is I am passing those models around for you to see if you look inside that vial one of those tiny crystallites it has that many units one one one and 18 zeros in the front of it in one little crystallites but to put it in perspective that model is 10 million times larger than reality and that's why we are able to put 10 to the 18th units in one time Crystal that you cannot see those units with your naked eye so because we could make those materials with such a high surface area we could make them programmable on demand they are great to capture and destroy those nasty chemicals to replace activated carbons to make the Next Generation sorbent so but let's compare mafs to something we really all use and understand a b sponge if we have a spill you take a sponge and you wipe the water and it captures all the water the idea here how can we make a synthesis to make human-made sponges to be able to capture those nasty harmful chemicals let me show you this is one of the agents it's really been used in several times in the last couple couple years in order to deactivate it it's a really simple transformation taking molecule on the lift to the molecule on the right it looks simple but it's very complex to do because you have to do it very quick otherwise it's too late so we wanted to learn from biology from nature is there anything out there that could do this transformation and do it well there is a bacteria that lives in farming land it has has an enzyme called phosphotriesterase this bacteria uses this enzyme to be able to live in the farming land why because they use pesticides and insecticides in the farming land and pesticides and insecticides are nothing but nerve agents for pests and insects so wanted to learn how this enzyme does it for that bacteria to live and if you zoom in into where the action side take place it's a very simple couple metals so what we wanted to do is how can we learn from this enzyme and take it into a man-made or a human-made synthesized molecule because this enzyme as great as it is you take it out of its cozy environment and it dies very quickly if we try to use this materials in desert this enzyme dies very quickly so we want to learn and be inspired from this enzyme but take it into a material that is stable and fast selective at the same time what do I mean by that let me introduce you to another molecule it's called VX we all heard of VX in the last 6 weeks this is the molecule that was used to assassinate the step brother of the dictator North Korean dictator this molecule to deactivate it we have to cut it in pieces however if you cut in the wrong place you will make another molecule is just as toxic as VX itself that means knowing where you cut is s just as important as how fast you cut it so that's the trick here let me show you one of the molecules one of the sponges that we actually discovered in our lab at Northwestern University it's called Anu 1000 you see those nice beautiful channels that Sirin going there interacting with those metals that we build them from inspiration from that enzyme and we put them in a material very stable and very rugged and you could see it taken chopping that harmful chemical in pieces let me show you some data but this data not with an actual agent this data is with a simulant or a surrogate because here at Northwestern University we're not going to be able testing nerve agents in our Labs so we use something very similar to that to do the testings you could see generation one it's okay it's not great it took 60 Minutes you have the time there and how much we destroyed to destroy 80% of the harmful chemical around we learned from that we made generation 2 generation 2 took only 30 minutes to completely destroy the whole sample Generation 3 which we made last year it took less than a minute to destroy the whole sample this is really impressive but the question is does it work against the actual agent with collaboration with the Army Labs we send our what we call them bioinspired sponges we send it to them they test them against those nasty chemicals the harmful VX the harmful GD under the conditions we tested our simulants and what they find that those materials work exactly the way we envision them to work this is exciting that we could now design materials to go beyond what what's the what's used currently so going forward you could see we have many many molecules to choose from many metals to choose from the question becomes which one to choose and that's why we want to be able to use the chemist intuition with supercomputing and software to be able to predict which components we should put in that sponge before we even go to the lab and make it so that that's the future but none of that could be useful if we all could make is that vial that is going around few milligrams if we cannot scale up this technology we should stop right now a startup company called newat Technologies in skoki was able to show that this technology is scalable so again that's great news so here what I hope to show you and share with you some of the thing some of the research activities that taking place just few buildings from here at Northwestern University we are inspired and we take our Clues from nature but at the end of the day we are making more stable programmable materials that we want to go beyond what nature can thank you