A project with the participation of IMB-CNM researchers, awarded in the Generating Ideas Programme
The project RES-KIT "Genetic pen-site kit for the detection of antimicrobial resistance genes", with the participation of three researchers of the GTQ Group (IMB-CNM), has won the Second Prize in the 2017 Generating Ideas Programme, which supports proposals for technology based market solutions.
The UAB Research Park and the Biotechnology Reference Centre recently awarded the prizes for the three best projects of the sixth edition of the Generating Ideas Programme (Programa de Generació d'Idees), an initiative which awards the best business ideas presented by researchers of the UAB campus and based on their research studies. This year's edition focused on the sectors of industrial biotechnology and biomedicine.
The programme's second prize went to RES-KIT, a diagnosis kit for the detection of mutliresistant bacteria in veterinary medicine, which permits a rapid and individualised treatement of mastitis in dairy cattle. It is based on a very low-cost microfluidic platform (lab-on-a-film) which allows either on the farm or in the clinic to conduct complex, slow and expensive laboratory protocols by directly using untreated milk samples. The kit reveals the bacteria causing the mastitis and its anti-microbial resistance genes, making it easier to select the antibiotic which best suits each animal. The group was formed with the participation of three researchers of the GTQ Group (IMB-CNM).
The technology, which has already produced a patent application, was developed by the team led by Antoni Baldi, researcher at the Barcelona Microelectornics Institute (IMB CNM CSIC), and formed by Laila Darwich from the Department of Animal Health and Anatomy of the UAB; Maria Diaz González and César Fernández Sánchez from the IMB CNM CSIC; Lourdes Migura-Garcia from theInstitute for Food Research and Technology (IRTA); Sergi Montané and Sergi Rodríguez from the Institute for Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB UAB), and Carolina Liz Mascaró, student of the UAB Master's Degree in Marketing.