Duarte and team advanced to finals of FDA Food and Safety Challenge

9/2/2015 Daniel Dexter, ECE ILLINOIS

Carlos Duarte and his team have been working on a device that detects pathogenic bacteria in food in a more efficient way.

Written by Daniel Dexter, ECE ILLINOIS

Through collaboration among Illinois and Purdue University students and faculty, PhD student Carlos Duarte and his team have developed a tool to get safe food from the farm to the grocery store faster than ever.

Duarte, right, and Bashir, middle, present their team's invention at the FDA Food and Safety competition.
Duarte, right, and Bashir, middle, present their team's invention at the FDA Food and Safety competition.

The research group has been working on a device that detects pathogenic bacteria in food in a more efficient way. Their invention combines the semiconductor and microfluidic technologies, which creates a portable and inexpensive tool for food safety applications.

The team was one of five teams to advance to the finals of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food and Safety competition, which asks participants to design a new method for bacteria detection. The Center for Disease Control estimates that one in six Americans suffer from foodborne illnesses annually.

“Many researchers are trying to improve the current culture-based detection that is expensive and very slow,” Duarte said. “Over the last 15 years, different approaches have surfaced with various levels of success. The fact that we made it to the finals of this challenge demonstrate that our approach of using electrical phenomena and electronic devices for the detection of bacteria is an alternative to the current method that solves problems FDA faces in its day-to-day operation.”

Carlos Eduardo Duarte Guevara
Carlos Eduardo Duarte Guevara

Bioengineering Department Head Rashid Bashir assembled the team when the FDA asked him to consider participating. Bashir’s longstanding relationship with Purdue’s Center for Food Safety Engineering helped establish the partnership between the two schools. Bashir is Durate’s adviser and an ECE affiliate.

Duarte’s area of expertise is ion-sensitive field-effect transistor (ISFET) research, which involves electrical detection of miniaturized DNA amplification reactions. The FDA project is his dissertation and as a result, Duarte led the proposal.

“I figured out the overall outline and then asked for specific information to each one of the teammates to assemble the complete document,” Duarte said about his role on the team. “In addition, the challenge had an ‘accelerator’ stage where all the teams discussed with FDA scientists the proposed system and they provided feedback. I was the one leading conversations with the FDA, gathering their feedback and modifying our concepts to comply with their needs.”

Rashid Bashir
Rashid Bashir

Duarte plans to pursue this project beyond the scope of the competition. It will culminate with new prototypes that will be tested against the techniques currently being used to detect bacteria in food. As the process continues, Duarte and the team will optimize the device to industry standards and hope to eventually integrate their product into FDA facilities.

For Duarte, the experience would not have been possible without the opportunities afforded to him by ECE ILLINOIS. When considering how the collaboration came to fruition, he gave credit to the department’s reputation of being an institution that fosters a deep breadth of knowledge in interdisciplinary fields.

“We have been able to establish national and international partnerships both with other academic institutions and industrial partners during the course of my research,” Duarte said. “These collaborations are fundamental to solve technical issues and obtain resources, and wouldn’t have been possible without the door-opening reputation of ECE ILLINOIS.”


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This story was published September 2, 2015.