Enrichment-free Salmonella detection for food safety

Project Summary Abstract Each year over one million people become ill due to foodborne Salmonella infectionsthis accounts for a total ofof all foodborne illness reported in the United StatesSalmonella is the leading cause for foodborne illness hospitalizationscasesand deathscasesSalmonella has an enormous impact on the economycausing $billion in costs in the United States each yearof this burden$millionis due to deaths$milliondue to hospitalizations anddue to non hospitalized casesThe primary mode of Salmonella infection is through foodmainly raw or undercooked meatraw eggs and unwashed vegetablesThese illnesses are often tied to outbreaks that result from contaminated food that was not detected at a manufacturing or packaging plantCurrent detection methods for Salmonella provide slow time to actionable resultsmaking it difficult to take necessary steps in controlling the pathogenSamplehas developed a new technologybased on the proprietary Bioillumination PlatformTMwhich utilizes a novel synthetic engineering approach to leverage the natural specificity of bacteriophage to detect the presence of specific bacterial speciesSampleDETECT S system contains engineered bacteriophageswhich can identify Salmonella sppto induce production of luminescent enzymesupon infection of the target cellseffectively illuminating SalmonellaThis signal can be measured with the SampleLuminometer and instantiates the world s first enrichment free pathogen diagnostic systemSamplehas previously established feasibility that the DETECT S assay can be adapted for finished product testing to detect Salmonella directly on food products that are prone to contaminationFor this Direct toPhase II projectwe propose to complete the development of our technology to detect Salmonella on additional foods to achieve validation as laid out in AOAC guidelinesWe will expand the testing to includeSalmonella isolates belonging to clinically relevant serotypesand complete assay development forfood matrices representing all commercially relevant categoriesincluding low moisture foodsFinallywe will develop non replicating phage technology for our BioIllumination Platform to further increase our reach in the marketboth domestically and internationally