Hate Airline Security Lines? A New Technology May Ease Your Pain

Duke Spinout Quadridox is developing new X-ray machinery for both airports and healthcare

Woman looking into airport X-Ray scanner

Tucked into an old brick building near the Eno River, which once housed a textile manufacturing business, is Quadridox — a company whose founders want to change the future of airline travel, while also making health care diagnostic testing more accurate.

Quadridox uses X-rays, but not the way doctors detect broken bones. Those X-rays make pictures by passing straight through objects. Quadridox’s X-ray diffraction imaging, on the other hand, is used to analyze the structure of materials by observing how X-rays bounce off atoms within them, providing greater specificity of the materials being viewed.

In other words, it can distinguish the differences between a plastic explosive and a piece of Play-Doh or between water and lighter fluid, says Joel Greenberg, co-founder and CEO, who earned his Ph.D. in physics at Duke University.

Having that information will make going through airport security quicker, resulting in more accuracy and fewer delays. Potentially, this could mean being able to bring safe liquids, such as water, through TSA.

“Being able to bring water bottles onboard instead of having to dump them out necessitates additional technology that can distinguish between the benign liquids and the potentially dangerous liquids on the airplane,” Greenberg said.

Though it’s a new application, X-ray diffraction has existed for the last century. It’s used mainly in laboratories to determine structural information such as chemical composition and crystal structure. The technology was used to reveal the double-helix model of DNA.

How Quadridox Came to Be

Greenberg began to think about its use for applications outside the lab while a researcher at Duke University.

“It was a really cool way to apply my physics knowledge to a bunch of everyday real-world application spaces,” said Greenberg.

He started working on the technology at Duke which, with the support of Duke’s Office for Translation & Commercialization, led to the formation of Quadridox in 2018. The company has since grown to 15 employees.

“We boast either current or former employees from pretty much all of the North Carolina universities,” Greenberg said. “Being here has allowed us to draw on amazing talent as well as interact with the Research Triangle Park and so many of the great entrepreneurial programs that are available to us here.”

One of them is David Coccarelli, a fellow Duke graduate and co-founder, chief operating officer and head of data and artificial intelligence.

“I was fortunate enough to be not only with people that I liked working with – a smart, intelligent team – but also technology that I felt was ready to bring into the real world. So, it was just kind of a perfect storm of a great many things,” Coccarelli said.

Greenberg said Quadridox would not be where it is today without support from Duke and sustained federal funding.

“Whether it’s going through an airport and seeing that Quadridox logo on a machine that we helped bring to life, or if it’s going to a hospital, and seeing that machine help people, that is going to be the biggest thing in our dream.”
David Coccarelli, a fellow Duke graduate and co-founder & COO of Quadridox

“There’s a kind of natural progression of new ideas and proof of concepts at the university that evolves into a startup company like Quadridox,” he said. “Federal funding has been absolutely critical for Quadridox and for the Duke research that informed Quadridox product development to get to the point where it is today.”

Building the Next Generation of Security Scanners

The walls of the cavernous building housing Quadridox are lined with all types of nuts and bolts and screws. The worktables are littered with tools. In the back are shelves filled with suitcases, briefcases, clothing, bottles and various types of liquids. In the center of the room is a full-scale conveyor belt and scanner into which those items are sent to test the technology.

Joel Greenberg and David Coccarelli show healthcare diagnostic applications of the X-ray.

Here is a view of what a security person would see going through the airport scanner.

The technology can distinguish liquids, such as water and lighter fluid.

“It’s an exciting time right now … we have full-up prototypes that have been built and iterated on over the last number of years,” said Greenberg. “All of the deployed systems go through a rigorous, regulatory process that the TSA has.”

He hopes to have some test machines in airports in the Eastern U.S. within the next year. But Greenberg isn’t stopping there.

For Use in Health Care

Since the technology can be applied in other fields, Quadridox is also developing a smaller, portable machine for use in health care settings. It can be used in combination with existing diagnostic technologies such as MRI, ultrasound or traditional X-ray.

“We see our X-ray diffraction imaging technology as complementary to other existing technologies,” Greenberg said. “We can present new images that allow the pathology assistant to more quickly and accurately evaluate the tissue.”

And that, he said, could mean the difference between a doctor being able to differentiate between a malignant tumor and a benign one.

Coccarelli said the team’s dream is to see its technology being used in the real world.

“Whether it’s going through an airport and seeing that Quadridox logo on a machine that we helped bring to life, or if it’s going to a hospital, and seeing that machine help people, that is going to be the biggest thing in our dream.”