INTERTRADEIRELAND:TESTING FOOD for freshness and new drugs for their potential toxicity to humans are just three of the many applications for sensor technologies developed by Cork-based biotechnology company Luxcel Biosciences. The InterTradeIreland 2003 All-island Seedcorn Business Competition winner has gone from strength to strength in recent years forming partnerships with world leaders including Pfizer and Mocon, for the deployment of its technologies.
The company’s highly innovative sensors, including oxygen and pH sensors and related tests, are used in food safety, “smart” packaging, pharmaceutical and basic research and development. They are also used in other life-science based markets such as water-quality monitoring and environmental toxicity screening.
“We are very much an intellectual property and product-development company”, says chief executive and co-founder Dr Richard Fernandez. “We are very focused on the science and technology end as well as on putting it in a product form.”
He explains the underlying principle on which the products are based. “Our sensors can measure oxygen. When a cell respires it can be measured. One of the most direct ways to measure the health of a cell is to see how it breaths. We can measure the oxygen usage of a single cell.”
For the drug discovery sector this means that mammalian cells can be placed in a vial with the new pharmaceutical compound and the level of stress placed on the cells measured by their oxygen consumption rate.
This technology also has direct relevance to the food safety sector. The bacteria level in food can be calculated by measuring the rate at which oxygen is being depleted. “This is a simple intuitive solution to a problem but there is a lot of high-tech science behind it,” says Fernandez.
The Luxcel sensors work by emitting invisible light at the red end of the spectrum. This light is quenched or absorbed when it comes into contact with oxygen molecules. The more light absorbed the more oxygen is present. In a way this could be described as radar in reverse with light coming back to the sensor when something is absent rather than present.
The positive results this generates are very important to sectors such as the food industry. The difficulty with many tests for food safety is that it is impossible to measure scientifically the absence of something and the closer you get to zero the harder it is to be definitive about a result. With the Luxcel test, however, the closer to zero in terms of bacterial activity or growth levels the more positive the result to the sensor.
This is the principle that has seen the technology being used by the global pharmaceutical and packaging industries. “Our sensors will be part of the packaging helping to create ‘smart packages’ and it will be a simple task to scan the sensor like a barcode and get a reading within hours rather than days in relation to the condition of the contents and the integrity of the packaging,” Fernandez says.
Further back in the food chain a meat processor will be able to take a sample from some beef or lamb, place it in a flask and the Luxcel system will analyse the oxygen depletion rate and give a result within hours or even minutes. “At the moment it takes about four or five days to send a sample to a lab and get a result back. With our test if the sample is badly contaminated you will have a result in minutes and if it is clear the result will be available in a few hours.”
Fernandez credits the support and assistance received through InterTradeIreland over the years as being instrumental in the company’s success. “We didn’t realise at the time what becoming Company of the Year for 2003 would do for us,” he notes. “It opened a lot of doors for us globally and helped us form a major strategic alliance with Mocon and got a lot of people to sit up and take notice of us.”
Since its Seedcorn win, Luxcel has become further involved with InterTradeIreland and has participated in its innovation programmes, Fusion and Innova. This has led to valuable links with research organisations in Northern Ireland, such as Fusion Antibodies and Queen’s University Belfast. Furthermore, the company’s Fusion graduate has remained with Luxcel and is now R&D manager.
“The Fusion programme is extremely good,” Fernandez says. “It puts graduates in front of prospective employers. We were one of the first into it and the first guy we hired from the programme, James Hynes, is now our head of R&D. The Innova programme is also very important as it fosters cross-border innovation. We already had a strong relationship with UCC and were collaborating with them on a number of projects but Innova helped us establish a relationship with Queen’s University Belfast which has been very important to us. The work that InterTradeIreland has been doing in that area has helped the Irish biotechnology sector come to be seen as providing a viable career path for graduates here.”
For the future he sees Luxcel continuing to focus on the development of new products. “We will continue to develop new products, validate them and work with the major players in the key application areas for them. Luxcel is really a kind of nuclear cell for product innovation.”
