Big Ideas Lab podcast visits the Forensic Science Center: part 2

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Forensic Science Center (FSC) is a unique place. It is the only forensic science center in the United States that could accept a truly mixed hazard sample — with a biological material, a chemical agent, explosives and nuclear material.

It is one of only two laboratories in the United States — and among 30 in the world — that is certified by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to test samples for chemical warfare agents.

The FSC has been an OCPW-designated laboratory since 2003 and has been working on chemical forensics for decades. Chemical forensics was used to investigate the Aug. 21, 2013 chemical weapons attack using a nerve agent called sarin in Eastern Ghouta, Syria.

“The first question is always: ‘is there a chemical warfare agent present?,’" said Audrey Williams, the director of the FSC. “If the answer is yes, which in the case of Syria it was, then it’s, ‘what other information can we get from that?’

“From this chemical information that you have, can you tell where this came from? Which side of a conflict used the weapon? Whose material did this come from? And so, what that really relies upon is some ground truth.”

This story — and other stories — of the work of the chemists, biologists and other researchers who comprise the Laboratory’s FSC are told in the newest episode of the Big Ideas Lab Podcast series. Listen on Apple or Spotify.

Another story is the saga of how a team of researchers led by synthetic chemist Carlos Valdez and biologist Mike Malfatti discovered a promising new treatment to counter the effects of fentanyl and related opioids.

This new treatment could, over time, be a boon to doctors and medical professionals dealing with the crisis of fentanyl, a drug whose lethal effects killed more than 210,000 Americans between 2022–24.

The main drug in today’s opioid overdose epidemic, fentanyl is a man-made, synthetic opioid that’s 100 times stronger than morphine. An amount equal to a few grains of salt is enough to kill a person.

Currently, the main drug used to counter fentanyl overdoses is naloxone (or Narcan), which works well but doesn’t remain active in the body for long and needs to be re-administered. Naloxone has a half-life (time until only half of the material is remaining) of 30 to 80 minutes.

The drug Subetadex, discovered by Lab scientists as a possible treatment, has a longer half-life of about 7.5 hours and acts to encapsulate the opioid, preventing it from binding to opioid receptors in the body.

“My idea was to see if we can use compounds known as cyclodextrins,” Valdez said. “They look like donut-shaped molecules, and I was thinking maybe we can use them to trap fentanyl in their interior. So, in the donut, the fentanyl will sit in there and we can hopefully neutralize it.”     

Tune in to the latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab Podcast to learn more about these scientists and what they do for the people of the United States. Listen on Apple or Spotify.