Disruptive portable device for pre-screening of Persistent Organic Pollutants –POPs- in food products and water

Project Information

NANOSCREEN

Grant agreement ID: 710537

DOI

10.3030/710537

Project closed

EC signature date 17 December 2015

Start date 1 December 2015

End date 30 April 2016

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine, maritime and inland water research, and the bioeconomy

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

SAFTRA PHOTONICS SRO
Slovakia

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NANOSCREEN (Disruptive portable device for pre-screening of Persistent Organic Pollutants –POPs- in food products and water)

Reporting period: 2015-12-01 to 2016-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are ubiquitous chemical substances that persist in the environment and bioaccumulate in humans mainly through feeding. They cause harmful effects which include damage in the reproductive health or even cancer. In the developed countries there is a strong legal framework that must be followed in order to reduce POPs burden, which includes analysis and detection. In this sense, gas chromatography and/or mass spectroscopy (GC-MS) are the common methods for POPs detection nowadays. However, their use entails some drawbacks:

-The test must be done in a lab. Hence, it is wasted a significant amount of time and money for transport.
-The laborious sample preparation (extraction/purification) and the equipment cost (≃€100.000) raise the final cost per sample due to the highly specialized personal required and a long amortization period.
-Consequently, the price per assay is high (€1,000 to 500) only considering reagents and energy required. This fact represents the larger barrier to perform a higher number of assays a year, which involve a lower quality control.

SAFTRA Photonics will put in the market a portable nano-optical sensing chip, NanoScreen, which will serve as a triage technique to detect in-situ and simultaneously (multiplexing) the most harmful POPs in any water or food matrix at an inexpensive price and in a short time-span, via a simpler procedure with respect current methods.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In order to confirm the feasibility of our project we have carried out a 6-month study consisting on:
-Our technical studies have proved the multiplexing capacity of our sensing chips and the perfect feasibility to differentiate the signal from several POPs. This fact will allow achieving remarkable cost savings per analysis which reach up to 90% of the current methodologies.
- Our market analysis has demonstrated that our target markets are relevant, and show great potential for growth (€2,5-4 billion by 2020). This, together with the uniqueness of our solution (no competitor has a pre-screening method) and the favorable legislative context (regarding environmental regulation) represents a very promising scenario for the deployment of our technology.
- Our thorough financial analysis has demonstrated the economic feasibility of our technologies, with precisely calculated production costs which are realistic and really competitive with those technologies currently in the market. Moreover, our forecast show that the impact can have a relevant economic effect, enabling us to achieve revenues of approx. €14.2 million in the fifth year of commercialization.
- Addressing of all kinds of contacts relevant for our project (collaborators, partners and investors), receiving several letters of support/intent.
- Development of complete Execution Plan for the Phase 2 project, including planning, organization, risk analysis and budget.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The unparalleled advantages of NanoScreen project regarding cost and speed will put our product in a really strong position into market, which will assure a larger market share and penetration.
Our preliminary case-studies show potential savings of 90% per analysis which proves the high added value of our proposal. By achieving our goal we will offer an alternative several steps ahead from any competitor and keeping prices in a range that any of our customers can afford, we estimate that we will put in the European, Japanese and USA market 55,000 of units by 2022, with revenue in 2023 of €4,841,000, a ROI of 2.25 and creating 9 job positions.

image-1.png