The Institute of Genomic Medicine (Imegen), a company located in the Scientific Park of the University of Valencia, has created a technology to detect the presence of horse meat in food using DNA technology. It is the first existing kit in this field and its development has been carried out on behalf of the American multinational Life Technologies, one of the world leaders in DNA technology.
According to the biotechnology company, founded in 2009 by two scientists from the University of Valencia with extensive previous business experience, Imegen began to develop the kit just over a month ago, after the food crisis that contained equine meat broke out without the relevant labeling. .
Faced with the alarm caused by consumers and European companies and the concern to increase controls, the Valencian company began the tests to carry out, in record time, this analysis technique that allows recognizing the components of the product and verifying if the content of the label corresponds to reality, as echoed by the SINC agency.
The system, which is already marketed under the name RapidFinder Equine ID Kit, works from several reagents linked together and offers results in twelve hours. Life Technologies is the company in charge of its commercialization among the food safety control bodies of the countries, as well as among the large biotechnology firms.
