BLACKSBURG -- Virginia Tech and Luna Innovations Inc. are working together on a federally funded project to protect people from the effects of nerve gas through buckyballs.

Researchers at Tech and the Roanoke-based technology development company recently received a three-year, $946,432 grant from the National Institutes of Health's CounterACT program to defend against terrorist chemical threats.

Roger Van Tassel, the principle investigator for Luna on the project, described buckyballs as "carbon cages, just like a soccer ball." These nanoparticles scavenge the harmful radical molecules that exist in some pesticides and types of nerve gas, such as VX and sarin gas.

Van Tassel said the research on this phenomenon began less than a year ago -- scientists don't even know exactly how the buckyballs neutralize the radicals.

"This is a drug discovery type of effort in the broadest of terms," he said. "Efforts like this generally take five to 10 years to hash out."

Van Tassel said that eventually the antidote could be applied by injection to people who have been exposed to nerve gas.

Marion Ehrich, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology at Tech and Van Tassel's counterpart on the project, said the Buckyball compounds are very stable and could be administered as a powder to people who have been exposed.

The role of Ehrich and Tech researchers on the project will be to take various buckyballs made by Luna and test them with various types and concentrations of insecticides, which have the same structure and will react to the buckyball compounds in the same way as nerve gas. Tech and Luna's work is part of a larger project by CounterACT to explore different ways to combat nerve gas.

Ehrich, co-director of Tech's Laboratory for Neurotoxicity Studies, has been working with organophosphate compounds and ways to alleviate their toxicity in pesticides since the 1980s.

She said there are compounds that can save people from the toxicity of nerve gas, but they're not perfect. They can mitigate some effects but can't stop damage the poisons do to the brain and have to be administered very quickly if they're going to work at all.

Public awareness of nerve gas has grown over the past 20 years, starting with the first Gulf War and fears that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would use it against troops or in missile attacks on Israel. Terrorists in Japan used sarin gas in an attack on Tokyo subways in 1995.

"Part of the problem is, you have almost no time," she said of reacting to the nerve gas. "They have what they call a really steep dose-response curve.

"A little bit will harm you and a lot will harm you a lot more, but you don't have much distance between where nothing happens and where you end up with things that are life threatening. So it makes it very difficult."

The first year of work will focus on picking out a compound that appears effective from research with cell cultures. Tests would be conducted and refined over the next two years, with animal testing coming only after extensive in-vitro work, Ehrich said.

"We're thinking at the end of three years we should have something that at least has a good prospect for development," she said.

"That's a win-win for Homeland Security, NIH, and it's a win-win for Luna."