I like doing research and it's fun.
You know, I don't consider it work.
And that's the goal in life to do something you like so much
that you don't think you're going to work.
You're going to do something you love.
I would like to think that that what I'm doing
could really help out a lot of people.
I'm Mark Witten.
I'm a
retired professor of pediatrics at the UVA College of Medicine.
I still have a
U of A appointment in the College of Agriculture
as a research scientist with my biosensor.
The lipid biofilm is a derivative of lung surfactant.
A surfactant in your lungs is a lipid substance
that basically coats the the 500 million
little gas sacts in your lungs called alveoli.
And I believe I have the fastest biosensor in the world
that can detect airborne bacteria and viruses.
We're down right now where we can accurately
measure four cells per mil of various bacteria.
And I ran those experiments at two hundredths
of a second time.
We estimate that we could put five sensors
in each of the 40,000 food
processing facilities in the United States alone.
They could detect whether their food products
have any of the three major foodborne bacteria Listeria,
salmonella or E coli 0157-87
in two hundredths of a second.
My biosensor potentially could be used
not only in food processing facilities,
it could be used by the military to detect biological
chemical warfare agents.
It could be used for explosive detection.
It could be used for building security.
It could be used to where you before you get on an airplane,
you breathe into this sensor and it lets us know
whether you're you are infected with COVID.
Whether you have influenza or respiratory syncytial virus.
Then I was in Saudi Arabia
and I was meeting with the head of research and development.
Saudi Arabia produces 8 million barrels of oil a day and uses
10% of that just to get fresh water out of seawater.
I actually got an epiphany with that meeting.
I knew that when I read ran really pure water
through my biosensor, I get a different curve.
From very pure water to water
that just has 0.09%, not even 1% salt in it.
And that indicated to me that my biofilm,
reacted with the salt.
And that's how the desalinization,
low energy desalinization, started.
So now I'm going to put it in the water.
Right now, desalinated water because of the huge power
requirements from reverse osmosis or flash distillation
where you just boil the seawater and collect the condensate.
It's 20 times more expensive than groundwater.
I just need a little bit of water movement
over the biofilm plate to have my desalinization process.
I would say I will use maybe 5 to 10% of the energy
that a reverse osmosis uses.
I've developed this now to where
we're ready to go to an industrial prototype phase.
So I have two companies.
Phenix Biometrics is a biosensor company, and Witten
Technologies is a low energy desalinization.
Motivating factor to me
is to try and improve the human existence.
And you could see that the salt is beginning
to interact with the biofilm.
You know, I love studying the human body.
I think it's the most complex organism.
So I'm not surprised that I was able to take something
from lung surfactant and do a lot of things with it.
From that standpoint, what we need to do is study
the body more and give us an idea
of how we can solve some of these complex problems.