| Project Detail |
Salmonella is the major food poisoning agent but it takes 3-5 days to detect Salmonella with current state-of-the-art testing technologies. But since food manufacturers need to send out products to retailers before that, the pathogen might already have spread before it gets detected.
DART is a new technology that allows immunoassays to have improved sensitivity in general. Its most pressing application is for the detection of Salmonella. DART is a fast detection kit of the Salmonella bacteria for food safety applications, based on a unique amplification reagent originally developed by us and enabled by the latest nano-medical advances.
Our unique approach is based on bringing the benefits of one of the latest discoveries in nanomedicine to industrial pathogen diagnostics. We created our startup company, ABDART Diagnostics Lda., with the purpose of improving diagnostics. We have received an investment from Caixa Capital who invested €100,000 to help use get to TRL6.
Our target market is the European Food Safety market sized at around €4 billion in 2018. Applying the global 20% share of Salmonella kits, this is around €800 million.
To get to commercialization, we need to decide on a specific roadmap (Phase I Project). Then, we need to enter the commercial product development and testing phase (Phase II Project). We will sell Dart kits to our market right after the Phase 2 project when we have all the necessary validations and certifications. We plan to charge €15 per kit, which is in line with prices of DNA-based tests and slightly higher than immunoassay-based competitors, both of which take much longer to have the test results (days) than via our approach (hours).
We can help reverse the main issue in Europe, which is that Salmonella outbreaks are not falling despite the resources and funding the EC is investing. A wide uptake of DART can result in Salmonella outbreaks to fall again.
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