Online monitoring of pathogens in times of Corona virus, influenza and legionella - eliminating infection risk for 20 million Europeans

Project Information

LegioDetect

Grant agreement ID: 969104

DOI

10.3030/969104

Project closed

EC signature date 18 February 2021

Start date 1 May 2021

End date 30 April 2024

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 3 270 312,50

EU contribution

€ 2 289 218,75

Coordinated by

KWO KUNSTSTOFFTEILE GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - LegioDetect (Online monitoring of pathogens in times of Corona virus, influenza and legionella - eliminating infection risk for 20 million Europeans)

Reporting period: 2022-05-01 to 2024-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

WHO declared Legionella as the highest health burden of all water borne pathogens - even for our developed European countries. There are thousands of infections with mortality rates between 5%-30%. Due to similar symptoms like with pneumonia or with flu (fever, coughing and diarrhoea, shivers, headache and body aches) presumed numbers of unidentified and unregistered cases are estimated to be much higher.
There is no automated and scalable solution on market which allows the continuous monitoring of in-house water quality regarding detection and quantification of legionella. Current solutions are laboratory procedures, e.g. cell cultivation, which are time-consuming, costly and mostly error-prone, e.g. by detecting no viable-but-non-cultivatable infectious legionella cells.
The overall objective is to improve the health safety of all Europeans, including 20 million people currently under concrete health risks. For this, we developed a worldwide unique solution for highly accurate and automated detection and quantification of legionella bacteria in water. LegioDetect is easy to use also for non-experts, data is easy to understand and thus, the system is perfectly scalable for the fast growing market of Legionella monitoring. Our system is intended for owners/operators of rental houses, public buildings or buildings of special interest (e.g. hospitals, hotels, baths or swimming pools), for private households, but also for operators of cooling towers.

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

We successfully progressed to further develop the existing prototype to market readiness. For this, we involved many stakeholders from different market sectors to continuously evaluate our assumptions and development stages. One result from this, for example, was the decision to develop different product versions specifically tailored to different market segments instead of creating an all-in-one solution with features probably not necessary for specific segments. Another result was the ideation of follow-on-innovations based on the technological know-how of the LegioDetect project. Further we successfully started to prepare market entry by communication and disseminating project information and by involving potential pilot customers for pilot projects following in the further course of the project. During the project we especially focused on the enhancement of the system regarding other Legionella types.

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 gold standard ISO11731 method is the state-of-the-art for legionella detection in water and consists of two manual steps: (1) water sampling at test point and (2) water analysing in laboratory. For the gold standard, a certified body has to sample water from the pipe of interest. For this, extraction pipes had to be installed at these pipes. Before sampling, extraction pipes have to be heated up to sterilise the extraction pipe. Then, a sample has to be extracted, sealed and sent to a certified laboratory. In laboratory, the sample is cultivated in a Petri plate on a nutrition medium. After about 14 days, the colonies formed by the propagation of the initial Legionella bacteria – if any – are counted and conclusions on the original numbers are drawn.
In contrast to the current state of the art, which has several shortcomings, our technology has several advantages creating a disruptive solution. By LegioDetect, the analysis can be done within hours directly at the point of interest and without the risk of errors occurring in sampling, sealing or transportation. Whereas laboratory method fails in counting viable but non-culturable legionella, those can be detected by LegioDetect and the analysis of LegioDetect is not affected by different kinds of bacteria growing on nutritional material in laboratory. Overall, LegioDetect goes beyond state of the art in terms of faster results directly at the point of interest and higher sensitivity and specificity both at lower costs and easier and safer usage.

Optical analysis