Tate & Lyle Ventures announced its first investment in January. The new venture capital fund, backed by Tate & Lyle, was formally launched on 24 July 2006. Its aim is to invest in startups and expansion stage companies that reflect Tate & Lyle’s drive for strategic growth through nextgeneration food ingredients, as well as innovations in industrial ingredients, bio-materials and biofuels.   

 

 For its first investment, the Fund has invested in food safety diagnostics company Lumora Ltd, a spin-out from Cambridge University, UK.   

 

Lumora has developed a revolutionary DNA-based test that will identify and measure specific food borne pathogens within a matter of hours.   

 

The new technology uses a novel version of the luciferase gene that enables fireflies to glow in the dark.  

 

 The presence of minute quantities of bacteria or viruses will cause samples, quite literally, to glow under highly sensitive cameras. Not only can the system identify the specific type of pathogen contaminating a food sample, it is extremely sensitive and can measure the precise amount of contamination. The new technology is also cost-effective compared with other DNA-based techniques, and much faster than more traditional culture-based systems – bringing detection times down from three to five days to a few hours.  

 

 Lumora’s system will enable food companies to bring real-time testing in-house rather than sending samples out to specialist external laboratories.   

 

 While the detection platform will primarily focus on bringing costsavings and efficiencies to pathogen detection, there are multiple applications for the technology within the food sector such as the detection of minute quantities of GM ingredients in products, or in combating growing levels of food fraud by assessing the provenance of natural food ingredients.   

 

Lumora was established by two leading academics in the field of biotechnology, Dr. Laurence Tisi and Professor Jim Murray from Cambridge University’s Institute of Biotechnology.