NSF Award
2329834
The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project includes the development of a new one-test screening method for identification of food borne bacterial pathogens. It is currently estimated that food borne pathogens cause 48 million illnesses, thousands of hospitalizations, and hundreds of deaths every year in the U.S. alone. Quick identification of the source and severity of the pathogen contamination in food is critical to avoid outbreaks as well as to ensure food safety. The proposed rapid diagnostic technology has a competitive edge over existing methods as it will provide test results under an hour, as opposed to existing multistep screening tests that can take several hours or days to get a result. Upon successful development and implementation, this technology will serve as an important tool for food safety diagnostics, that will enable identification of contaminated food early in the food supply chain and thereby helping avoid major food-borne illness outbreaks and expensive food recalls. <br/><br/>The proposed project will focus on addressing an important problem in the food industry. Most existing methods used by food safety diagnostic labs for pathogen screening are slow, require expensive instrumentation, demand skilled technicians and are often not the best choice for rapid screening purposes. The proposed project will focus on the development of a new rapid screening of bacterial pathogens in select food matrices that combine both sample preconditioning and detection steps in a single test and platform. The experimental tasks include design and development of a prototype platform device and robust testing and optimization of the diagnostic method using practically relevant samples. Upon successful development and validation, the technology could be adopted and modified for other rapid diagnostic applications in the fields of health care and environmental monitoring.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
