Belfast company make food safety breakthrough

A Belfast company, Xenosense, has developed a unique testing kit that has been hailed as a major contribution to enhanced food safety.

Modern agriculture requires the use of drugs to protect animal health but there is growing concern that small amounts of drugs such as antibiotics are being passed on to the consumer.

Xenosense, a spin out company from Queen’s University, has developed innovative products to help provide information about how much and what type of drug residue is present in food. This allows producers to quality control their output in an effective and efficient way.

The General Manager of Xenosense, Dr Andrew Baxter, said: "We knew that there was a crucial need to develop faster ways of performing multi-residue antibiotic testing. Our new testing kit for a group of antibiotics called Sulfonamides, is based on the latest Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) sensor technology, and is user friendly, reliable and reusable.

"It can detect 18 Sulfonamide drugs in a single analysis and at much lower levels than other methods currently being used, which makes it an important breakthrough in food safety. Support from Invest NI was crucial in allowing us to develop a commercial product.”

The company, which is based in the Innovation Centre at the Northern Ireland Science Park in Belfast, worked with Queen’s University to develop the technology. Its target market is the European and national food monitoring laboratories as well as food companies. Since the launch of the testing kit companies in the US and in South-East Asia have expressed interest in the product.

(SP/MB)