Roanoke County business owners expect patented lead test to be a hit

Source: The Roanoke Times, Va.自存倉Oct. 20--They sign contracts, do most of the drug testing and take out the trash at the company's small office suite in Roanoke County.Patriot Drug & DNA Testing employs two people: Nancy Harms, president, and her husband, William Holmes, operations manager.But that could change.Working with New Jersey-based OFT Labs, the couple has collected data and otherwise supported efforts of the New Jersey company to patent a technology for testing oral fluids in people of all ages for the presence of heavy metals, including lead.Harms alerted the labs' founders several years ago about the need to test children from the age of 6 months to 6 years for lead and other heavy metals. She and Holmes had a pre-existing relationship with the founders, who had helped the couple learn how to do drug testing when Harms and Holmes worked at Hargrave Military Academy from 1998 to 2005.She said the prospect of such non-invasive sampling, which would rely on a swab to collect a sample of oral fluids, has "attracted a huge amount of interest" from federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.And if the patented test is embraced as enthusiastically as Harms and Holmes anticipate, their business could grow dramatically in both personnel and revenues.That will happen, Holmes said, "if it hits like we think it's going to hit迷你倉"Patriot Drug & DNA Testing would be the exclusive training site for people learning how to conduct the sampling, he said, and would also be a primary collection site.Harms and Holmes said the test will provide an easy method for testing for the presence of lead in children. Current testing typically relies on a blood sample, an invasive sampling method that many people shy away from, Harms said.As a result, she said, many children, who are especially vulnerable to the neurological damage done by lead poisoning, go untested.According to the patent's abstract, "the concentration of lead in oral fluid can be accurately correlated with the concentration of lead in the blood serum."During a five-month period that began in 2008 and ended in 2009, Harms collected oral fluids samples from children at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and determined that the results of related testing correlated with samples acquired by drawing blood.She said the oral fluids test is so non-invasive that she "actually sampled kids while they were sleeping."Harms said the new sampling method would reduce concerns about blood-borne pathogens and storage temperature fluctuations and encourage a higher rate of participation.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Roanoke Times (Roanoke, Va.) Visit The Roanoke Times (Roanoke, Va.) at .roanoke.com Distributed by MCT Information Servicesmini storage