Ex-Soviet Strives to Protect U.S. From Biowarfare
Monday, October 29, 2001
By Justin Gillis,
Washington Post Staff Writer
In the springtime of his life, a man named Kanatjan Alibekov dreamed up efficient ways to kill Americans. That was back in the Soviet Union, when he was a rising star in a top-secret germ-warfare program. By his own account, he helped build enough biological weapons, including anthrax bombs, to kill millions.
Today he is an older man, and a changed one. The fellow who now calls himself Ken Alibek sat in a tiny office at a George Mason University building in Manassas the other day, surrounded by medical texts. With urgent mien and kindly smile, he outlined his present venture: a plan to defend the United States against the very kind of attack he once plotted.
Ken Alibek, a "biowarrior" turned defector turned patriotic American, is learning to be a capitalist.
He has hooked up with an Alexandria company and, supported by federal grants, opened a laboratory of 35 people. His research is aimed at producing an inhaled, immune-boosting drug that could be stockpiled in case of new acts of terrorism using germs.
It would be, in effect, a universal antidote to any bioterror agent the nation's enemies might deploy. Alibek acknowledged the research could easily fail, but he said he believes it's the best shot at creating a general defense.
Hadron Advanced Biosystems Inc., Alibek's company, sports an unusual provenance for a biotechnology venture. No other company, doing any kind of work, can claim to be headed by a former No. 2 man in a vast Soviet program aimed at turning anthrax, plague, smallpox, tularemia and many other germs into weapons of war.
"My first thought was, 'I'm glad he's on our side,' " said C.W. Gilluly, a businessman who cut a deal to help Alibek test his biodefense theories.
So is Alibek. He said in an interview that when he fled a collapsing Soviet empire, embittered and disillusioned, to come to the United States in 1992, he found his true home. He also found a nation not ready to heed the warnings of bioterrorism. Alibek, 51, has been predicting such an attack for years, most comprehensively in a 1999 book he wrote called "Biohazard."
"I suspected that the 21st century wouldn't be a century of total wars between major powers," he said. "It would be a century of low-intensity military conflicts — a century of terrorism."
In recent years Alibek has repeatedly testified before congressional committees and briefed high-ranking government administrators. Since the anthrax scare started, he has become a public voice on biological terrorism, appearing numerous times on television.
Alibek said that vaccines and drugs, though they may play important roles, won't be able to protect the entire U.S. population from the scores of organisms that bioterrorists might use. Thus his own venture: a plan to develop a spray that would kick-start the general immunologic defenses of the mucous membranes lining the nose, throat and lungs.
At the first sign of a terrorist attack, Alibek said, people in danger zones could use such a spray, perhaps stockpiled in their homes and offices for such an emergency. This could happen even before scientists knew what germ was involved. The spray would rev up a person's immune system to fight the germ.
It would be just a first line of defense — once the germ was identified, more specific treatments or preventives might be deployed, if available. The strategy might not save the entire population of a city under attack, Alibek said, but it could save a large percentage.
The idea of boosting general immunity — "nonspecific immunity," doctors call it — might once have been dismissed as crazy. American scientists have a long record of failure and few successes in attempts to do so. Many tend to favor strategies such as vaccines and drugs that are aimed at specific organisms.
In recent years, however, a few drugs have been discovered that work by boosting general immunity, notably a medicine to treat hepatitis. Variations of the approach are under development for cancer and other diseases. Early research has suggested the strategy may be particularly useful for germs that enter the body through mucous membranes, as most bioterror agents would.
In fact, the potential of such a treatment led the Institute of Medicine, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences and the nation's most prestigious advisory panel on medical issues, to urge that research on ways to boost nonspecific immunity be given a high priority in counterterrorist planning.
"It's not a crazy idea," said Peter Rosen, an expert in emergency medicine at the University of California at San Diego who headed the Institute of Medicine panel. "I think it is the kind of science that ought to be pushed." He added, though, that results could take years.
The government is supporting at least three companies working in the field, including Alibek's. Alibek's money, $12 million in federal grants over the past two years, is coming from three federal agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, best known as the original creator of the Internet. That agency tends to fund high-risk research that would produce a vital boost to national defense if it were to succeed.
Alibek's venture is a subsidiary of Hadron Inc. of Alexandria, a publicly traded 37-year-old government contractor specializing in defense and espionage work. Hadron flirted with bankruptcy a few years ago, but it has since restructured and drawn fresh investment.
The company's shares, closing Friday at $3.50 a share, are up 230 percent since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Still, it's an open question whether Hadron, even with government support, can find the many millions that would be needed to prove Alibek's ideas in human tests. Company executives said they assume they will need to form a partnership with a larger pharmaceutical company.
Alibek is moving ahead. He said he and his lab workers already have isolated immune-boosting compounds that seem able to protect animals exposed to biological agents, and Hadron is filing for more than 20 patents on his work. Hadron is about to open a new laboratory in Rockville to expand the research.
Risky as the venture may be, the company is betting that the nation will have no choice but to move forward with unconventional ideas that may pay off down the road, such as Alibek's. Conventional approaches to disease simply aren't going to do the trick in an era of bioterror, company executives said.
"There are 70 known agents used in biological warfare," said Sterling E. Phillips Jr., Hadron's president and chief executive. "If you vaccinate the world against anthrax, there's 69 other choices on the menu." |
