DNATrek of San Francisco is creating liquids that
can be sprayed on fresh foods to detect harmful bacteria.
The liquids contain DNA sequences. The technology
works much like an idea developed in Ontario to incorporate DNA into food packaging to detect if and when
harmful bacteria develop.
The Ontario innovation has never caught on with
the food industry. It’s too early to tell whether the liquid-spray innovation
will catch on.
The science came from the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, also in San Francisco, writes Stephanie Lee of the San
Francisco Herald.
She writes that “the technology could solve the enormous challenge of tracing an outbreak’s
source — the places where food items are grown, packed and shipped. When people
start feeling the symptoms of salmonella or E. coli, many clues about the
contaminated product’s origins, such as the shipment boxes, already have
disappeared.
The Food and Drug
Administration has already recognized the invention as a safe
food additive, but for now, the industry does not use it.
After large-scale tests
that are set to begin next year, DNATrek believes that its tool will emerge as
a powerful weapon against food-borne illnesses, which cost the country an
estimated $150 billion a year in health-related expenses, and counterfeit food
products, which cost the global industry $10 billion to $15 billion annually
Lee writes.
“If there’s a problem
at home and there’s a piece of the cantaloupe left, you can pick it out of the
trash, you can scrub the surface, and all the available information is there
and you know exactly where it came from,” said Anthony Zografos,
founder and CEO of the self-funded, three-employee startup that expects to
close a round of seed funding by the end of the month.
George Farquar, a physical chemist at Lawrence
Livermore, patented the product in 2010 with about $3 million in
research funding from the Department of
Defense.
Originally conceived as
a biodefense tool, it combines FDA-approved foodstuffs, such as sugar, and a
unique DNA sequence to create safe, inhalable microparticles for the purposes
of tracking airflow indoors and outdoors.
It has been used to
test whether, for instance, air detection systems are able to notice particles
that resemble anthrax. Last week, company executives and scientists traveled to
the Pentagon to
run their third series of tests.
