At the University of Kansas, doctoral student Deepak Timalsina has cracked a problem that's haunted water safety officials for years: how to find PFAS—the infamous "forever chemicals"—faster and cheaper than ever before. The breakthrough, published recently in the journal PLOS Water, could transform how thousands of municipal and private labs across America test drinking water for these persistent pollutants.
PFAS chemicals lurk in water supplies nationwide, a legacy of decades of industrial use in nonstick cookware, stain-resistant fabrics, and firefighting foams. Once in the environment, they don't break down. Once in the human body, they accumulate over years—with blood half-lives ranging from five to eight years—and emerging research links them to kidney cancer, testicular cancer, immune system damage, and developmental issues. With U.S. lawmakers pushing stricter drinking water standards, the challenge for labs is no longer whether to test for PFAS, but how to do it affordably enough to comply with regulations demanding detection at parts-per-trillion levels.
The current EPA limit sets some PFAS compounds at about 4 parts per trillion, with regulated levels ranging from 4 to 10 parts per trillion depending on the compound. To understand just how stringent this is, imagine searching for a few grains of sand in an Olympic-size swimming pool—that's the sensitivity required. Michael Zhuo Wang, a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at Kansas who co-authored the study, explains that the gold standard instrument, LC-MS (liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry), cannot reach these ultra-trace levels without first concentrating the water sample. Therein lay the bottleneck: traditional concentration methods were brutally slow, turning a 500-milliliter sample into a time-consuming marathon that drove up costs for labs already stretched thin.
The KU team, led by Timalsina with co-author Bhargavi Srija Ramisetty, merged two techniques to solve this problem: fast-flow solid-phase extraction for concentrating PFAS from water, combined with UPLC-MS/MS for ultra-sensitive analysis. The results speak for themselves. What once required about 100 minutes to load a 500-milliliter sample now takes just 6 to 8 minutes—a roughly 20-fold acceleration. When scaling up to larger volumes, the advantage becomes even more striking: processing 4 liters of water that would have consumed more than half a day now takes about 60 minutes.
The practical implications ripple outward. Faster analysis means lower labor costs. Simpler logistics mean more labs can feasibly adopt the method. Reduced processing time means water systems can respond more quickly to contamination concerns. For municipal water departments operating on tight budgets, and for regions where PFAS contamination is widespread, these gains translate directly into resources that can stretch further and faster.
Wang emphasizes that these aren't theoretical improvements—they're field-tested, scalable, and ready for real-world deployment. As stricter regulations take hold across the country, the bottleneck shifts from "can we detect PFAS" to "can we afford to test widely enough." The KU team's faster, cheaper method answers that question. In the calculus of environmental health and public safety, that's exactly the kind of breakthrough that allows good policy to become good practice.