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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Bac-Tracker (Empowering food manufacturers with a novel device for fast, accurate and cost-effective food safety testing)

Teaser

Summary

Every year around 600 million foodborne illnesses and 420,000 deaths are caused by a series of hazards, with 80% of the cases depending on 5 bacteria.
Positive release is the approach that is being gradually introduced by the 8,000 B$ worth food industry to reduce the tremendous impact of food poisoning: products are released to the market only after lab tests assure they are safe.
However, current food safety tests are based on time-consuming cell culturing approaches to grow bacteria at detectable levels, which causes test to last 48-72 hours, and up to 5 days for specific tests.
Therefore, food manufacturers are at a crossroad: positive release means accumulating stocks in warehouses, raising costs for storage and shortening the products shelf-life for fresh foods. On the other side, compromising food safety procedures accelerates the turnover of goods but endangers the safety of consumers and the companyâ€™s reputation.
To address these issues, Bactusense has developed a completely new approach to food safety â€“ the Bac-Tracker â€“ which shortens the time needed for bacteria detection from days to few hours, depending on the specific test.
Our patented device leverages on a disposable silicon chip patterned with millions of micro-pillars serving as physical traps for bacteria, which are measured and detected by an optical sensor.
The system is fully automated, allowing in-house food safety tests also for companies that donâ€™t have specialized microbiology facilities or expert operators.
After the successful lab validation, the product development roadmap is now focused on taking the technology to the industrial stage through further product optimization and in-field validation (Phase 2) together with large prospective customers, which will pave the way to the commercialization in 2021.â€ƒ

Work performed

Starting from the successful lab-scale demonstration of the technology, during this Phase 1 project we focused on validating the technical applicability of the Bac-Tracker solution in real industrial settings and the feasibility of the business model.
By interacting with our main customers (both food manufacturers and large contract laboratories), we collected the key requirements to be fulfilled by the technology and detailed product specifications.
This led to extensive efforts towards product updating and re-engineering, as well as in determining the first application scenario for the successful introduction of Bac-Tracker into industrial processes.
The resulting action plan included tests of different chip designs, optimization of the analysis protocols and improvement of the detection algorithms. Bactusense also ran a first in-field trial with one of the largest food manufacturers, proving that the Bac-Tracker system works as a robust, precise and rapid (final results obtained in few hours) method for bacterial detection and quantification in water sample.
The business feasibility of our project was also assessed leveraging on feedback collected from our potential customers. Large national and European food manufacturers and contract labs expressed their interest to collaborate for pilot demonstrations in their facilities. Remarkably, the opportunity to shorten the time-to-result emerged as the main driving force to adopt the technology. The technological features (sensitivity and selectivity) of the Bac-Tracker solution, its ease-of-use and its significant cost-effectiveness were also pointed out as key purchasing factors.
During the Ph1 project we also gained a deeper knowledge of our total addressable market and consolidated a sustainable commercialization strategy that will bring Bactusense to expand its business starting from Israel and towards EU and US with significant revenues expected starting from 2021.

Final results

\"As confirmed by our stakeholders, the most common methods of choice for food safety testing is cell culturing in Petri dishes, which is reliable and affordable. Nevertheless, its main disadvantages are the long time needed to get the results (48 to 72 hours) and the dependency on human operators which exposes them to the general risk of false positives and negatives. Rapid test alternatives to this gold standard are also a widely adopted solutions by contract laboratories, but they are expensive and have an average time-to-result that lies between 24-48 hours.
The main results achieved during this feasibility study is a concrete and in-field demonstration of a truly rapid bacterial test which, for the first time is shortening the testing time from days to hours. This is expected to have a dramatic impact on the way food is being manufactured and released into the market, with huge estimated savings for producers and contract labs, and a highly-guaranteed food safety. Indeed, all the food manufacturers and contract lab we interacted with expressed a strong interest in the Bac-Tracker solution, considered as a potential \"\"game changer\"\" for their business, leveraging on the foreseen opportunity to offer fresher products to final consumers while saving on storage costs and not being exposed to any risk of supplying contaminated products.\"