Accelerating Food Safety: Next-Generation Foodborne Pathogen Rapid Test Kits with Enzyme Amplification

Early rapid and accurate detection of foodborne pathogens is important for outbreak prevention detecting pathogens early along the supply chain to prevent contaminated food from reaching the market and consumers and ensuring that food consignments are not subjected to unnecessary delays leading to food spoilage. Our rapid test kit (RTK) platform with enzymatic amplification enables ultrasensitive (10-1000 times more sensitive than conventional RTK) detection of foodborne pathogens E. coli (EC) O157:H7 and Salmonella Enteritidis (SE). Also confirmatory culture-based methods or technologies (e.g. polymerase chain reaction and mass spectrometry) are labor-intensive have long turnaround time (5 days) and require expensive instrumentation. This is too slow and expensive for the food industry for mass screening. Our RTKs are rapid (15 min runtime) inexpensive user- friendly and the results can be read directly by the naked eye making them promising for on-site testing methods. This encourages testing at multiple critical production points which can promptly prevent contaminated samples from proceeding further down the production line. Herein we will complete validation work of our Phase I's RTKs (EC O157:H7 and SE) to fulfill all requirements to obtain the Association of Official Analytical Collaboration (AOAC) Performance Tested Method certification. Concurrently we plan to develop large-scale manufacturing methods and documentation to scale up production. These advancements will aid our product launch and marketing during commercialization. Additionally we plan to develop a Salmonella spp. RTK leveraging our platform with enzymatic amplification which can be used in alignment with gold standard culturing method as an initial screening.