bioMérieux launches groundbreaking Salmonella detection technology to improve food safety

bioMérieux, a world leader in the field of in vitro diagnostics, today announced the launch of a new, innovative food safety testing method, VIDAS® UP Salmonella (SPT). This new food safety solution utilizes recombinant bacteriophage (phage) proteins, which offer best-in-class specificity and sensitivity for the targeted capture and detection of Salmonella bacteria in food and environmental samples. The technology complements the company’s VIDAS E. coli O157 (including H7) phage technology for the detection of Escherichia coli O157:H7.

Salmonella is a bacterium that causes one of the most common intestinal infections worldwide (Salmonellosis). In the United States alone it is implicated in more than one million cases of foodborne illness annually, according to a 2011 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of these cases, approximately 20,000 result in hospitalization and 378 result in death.

“The issue of food safety is a significant public health concern globally, and food producers and manufacturers are in need of more advanced, comprehensive and science-based approaches to ensuring the safety of their products,” said Jean-Marc Durano, corporate vice president, Industrial Microbiology, bioMérieux. “VIDAS SPT, the latest addition to the VIDAS UP range, provides optimum performance to help simplify agri-food laboratories’ workflow and deliver rapid information to maximize the overall efficiency of food production. We, at bioMérieux are pleased to provide yet another innovative solution to combat one of the most important food safety challenges today.”

The new VIDAS SPT assay, utilizing phage protein technology, is able to detect low levels of contamination by Salmonella and is one of the most rapid and easy-to-use diagnostic tools available for the screening of Salmonella in environmental samples, standard and large-size food samples. The technology provides an extremely simple, one-step sample preparation which reduces laboratory hands-on time, and delivers results in as little as 19 hours as compared to reference methods which require up to three days.

“Because phages are extremely host-specific, they can offer unrivaled specificity and sensitivity for the targeted capture, detection and differentiation of bacteria from a given sample,” said Dr. Lawrence Goodridge, associate professor of food microbiology, Colorado State University. “Food pathogen detection methods utilizing bacteriophage technology can provide food producers with the ability to detect bacterial pathogens present in their products with unprecedented speed and reliability. This is critical to reducing the magnitude and severity of foodborne illness caused by the consumption of foods contaminated with dangerous bacteria.”

About Bacteriophages

Bacteriophages, some of the most abundant life forms on earth, are highly specific viruses programmed exclusively to identify and infect host bacteria. Phages have co-evolved with bacteria for more than a billion years and are able to survive in the most extreme environments including soil, animal waste and intestinal tracts. Research shows that bacteriophages offer a number of advantages, such as superior specificity and superior binding, when used in microbiological test systems. Phage proteins have been proven to provide robust performance in many different applications, even when challenged with the most demanding and complex food matrices.

Licensed exclusively to bioMérieux, the recombinant phage technology was developed by the German biotech company Hyglos GmbH.

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