Innovative spoilage test for microbrewers

IBioIC project funding enabled The Antibody Company to develop a novel test that has the potential to substantially reduce spoilage issues for microbrewers.

Introduction

The Antibody Company (TAC) is a contract manufacturing organisation whose core specialisation is in the production of antibodies from hybridoma and recombinant cell lines. TAC effectively partners with clients to deliver their projects and works on a range of antibody production related projects. Their projects often extend beyond routine antibody production to include process development and immune assay development.

TAC was looking for novel diagnostic markets and identified detection of spoilage organisms in microbrewing as an opportunity to create a simple point of care diagnostic tool that would address the issue of spoilage in craft beer.

Challenge

Spoilage of beer by bacteria costs the industry up to 25% of their product. Current tests are expensive, time consuming, and require laboratory expertise, creating barriers for microbrewers to perform tests.

The Antibody Company wanted to investigate whether they could develop a low cost point of care diagnostic which would reduce losses for microbrewers.

IBioIC awarded £54k through their Impact Accelerator funding programme to University of Strathclyde to work with The Antibody Company to investigate ways to improve the process.

Solution

TAC designed a prototype lateral flow device (LFD) that can be used to detect spoilage in beer at an early stage.

The team developed an antibody to the spoilage organism lactobacillus brevis (LB) which was then sequenced, modelled computationally and used to develop conjugates and LFD protocol. The lateral flow device (LFD) kits used a novel conjugation methodology to decrease development time, decrease cost of conjugation and increase sensitivity. This innovation allowed the company to produce kits at a much reduced cost.

Result

The project helped to demonstrate that computer modelling can be used to accelerate research and development, and validated TAC’s understanding of LFD mechanisms.

The company now has the potential to develop additional products and bring on board additional staff as a result of being able to bring in-house two significant technologies; gold nanoparticle conjugation and LFD development.