Purdue University was named the grand prize winner of FDA’s 2014 Food Safety Challenge—a competition to advance breakthrough ideas on how to find disease-causing organisms in food, especially Salmonella in fresh produce. As the winner, Purdue received $300,000 for its submission, “Physical method for concentrating Salmonella to detectable levels using automated microfiltration.” According to FDA, this innovation uses miniscule filters to capture small numbers of foodborne pathogens in large volumes of liquid suspensions.
Pronucleotein Inc. was the runner-up for its entry, “DNA aptamer-magnetic bead sandwich assays used to detect foodborne pathogens with a handheld fluorescence reader,” for which it received $100,000. This innovation uses small strands of DNA bound to magnets to capture foodborne pathogens, which are then tagged with pigments that light up and can be detected.