Mycotoxins are invisible hazard compounds which naturally occur in food and are dangerous for human and animal health upon ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact. They can originate directly on the field, during storage, transportation or packaging and are hardly eliminated because of their stability against heat, physical, and chemical treatments. Mycotoxins are causing a great challenge to food industry, contaminating 25% of the global food supply and as a result leading to annual losses of around 1 billion tons of food products.
Nowadays many agriculture value chain participants do not have an ability to check mycotoxins containment rapidly onsite and receive highly accurate quantitative results. Current way of mycotoxins testing can be divided into two main ways with their advantages and drawbacks. The first one is laboratory testing. Such testing is characterized with the highest accuracy, but at the same time it is impossible to perform testing onsite and quickly. Consequently, farmers, traders, feed producers and other market players need to spend time and money to send samples to laboratory and then wait long hours to get mycotoxin testing results. Time is crucial in mycotoxins detection, because toxins can easily spread throughout foods and feed and contaminate the rest of production. Another method of testing mycotoxin contamination is strip tests, which enable market players to perform test onsite and get results in few minutes. However, the accuracy of such tests is very low, and results are often visual, which is not acceptable at the borders or by food safety controls, where it is crucial to know the exact number of mycotoxins per unit of weight.
BIOsens creates unique value by making mycotoxins testing process accurate, rapid and easy to perform at the same time. BIOsens device provides customers with ability to get quantitative results onsite with the same accuracy as laboratory solutions within 25 minutes. Therefore, clients save money avoiding mycotoxins contamination in crops, protect the animals’ health from mycotoxicosis, improve the process of decision-making by proceeding the operations faster and ensuring the quality of supplies.
The objective of the SME Instrument Phase 1 project was to conduct a feasibility study for BIOsens commercialization that includes in-depth analysis of target markets and validation of the market entry strategy, unique value proposition validation, development of IPR protection strategy and elaboration of the business plan. The SME Instrument Phase 1 project allowed BIOsens to prepare for rapid global commercialization of the innovative solution and fulfill its mission rooted in the fundamental human need for safe, abundant food.
