Food safety tool earns $100K from innovation fund
Summary
A Purdue startup, which was just named to a prestigious business school list of most fundable companies for its foodborne pathogen detector, is also reaping awards at home. West Lafayette-based OmniVis was awarded this week a $100,000 grant from the Purdue Ag-Celerator, an agriculture innovation fund. The OmniVis team developed a hand-held device to rapidly detect pathogens in food, water and the agriculture production chain.In an interview with Inside Indiana Business of Health reporter Kylie Veleta, OmniVis CEO and co-founder Katherine Clayton explained the relevance of iSpyDx.Weve created a handheld device that can rapidly detect for foodborne pathogens, like E. coli in under 30 minutes, anywhere in the world, said Clayton, who explained users can take the data, map it and put it on a cloud platform, so that people can mitigate for risk in the future and have better food handling processes.Last month, the biotechnology company was named to the Most Fundable Companies list from Pepperdine Universitys Graziadio Business School. We saw that there were customers here in the United States that we could also help with different types of diseases and infectious pathogens, and so we decided to focus more stateside and look at food related diseases.Clayton says with one in every six people in the U.S. getting a food-related illness every year, OmniVis realized there is a domestic need.At the end of the day, growers just want to put food on our tables. So, we want to have this win-win situation for everyone involved, Clayton said.Clayton says the device performs to laboratory method standards but does not require special equipment or training.