LITMUS and FDA Collaboration Leads to Global Food Safety Breakthrough
Released on = April 3, 2007, 5:18 am
Press Release Author = LITMUS LLC
Industry = Food & Beverage
Press Release Summary = LITMUS, LLC, a leading global technology innovations company, announces today a breakthrough which will dramatically improve current testing methods to detect food borne pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria, Campylobacter, and E.coli.
Press Release Body = LITMUS, LLC, a leading global technology innovations company, announces today a breakthrough which will dramatically improve current testing methods to detect food borne pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria, Campylobacter, and E.coli. This advancement in bacterial pathogen-testing technology provides growers, producers and processors quicker and more accurate results, thereby reducing the risk of contaminated foods reaching consumers. The new procedures are the result of a two-year collaboration between LITMUS and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s National Center for Toxicological Research.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that unsafe foods cause as many as 76 million illnesses in the U.S. annually. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the national costs associated with food borne illness could be as much as US$37 billion annually.
CEO and founder of LITMUS, Mark Diggs, said: "One of the key issues in protecting the public from bacterial outbreaks is being able to quickly and accurately detect bacterial pathogens before they hit the grocery shelves. This is no simple matter and the available testing methods simply take too long."
LITMUS Scientist, Dr. Dwight Miller said: "Our progress over the last two years has been remarkable. These new methods are unlike any currently available and they yield more accurate results in just minutes versus days."
Currently, most food products are tested by "culturing" samples to see if any bacterial pathogens are present. The results must then be assessed by a microbiologist or expert lab technician. The entire process typically takes two to three days which is a substantial delay for perishable products like meats and fresh produce waiting to enter the supply chain.
The new method eliminates the lengthy process of growing cultures and waiting on lab analysis. The LITMUS RAPID-B methods bypass the culturing and expert identification phase by directly detecting and identifying individual bacteria in one step and provide results in less than 15 minutes.
This new disruptive breakthrough is the result of an alliance formed under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) in April 2005 with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's National Center for Toxicological Research. The new technology will be marketed through LITMUS RAPID-B, LLC, a subsidiary of LITMUS, LLC.
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