Company.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: [small biz] TECH STARTUP - Beacon Biotechnology

BEACON FOOD SAFETY

INITIAL LIGHT BULB: Growing from a partnership between medical-diagnostics startup Beacon Biotechnology in Aurora and Templar Cos. in Greenwood Village, Beacon Food Safety takes the Beacon BrightSPOT Reader to the meat market.

"We realized (Beacon's) technology with minor adjustments was directly transferable to the food industry to identify food-borne pathogens," says Templar's Bill Locatis, who serves as the chairman and CEO of Beacon Food Safety. "It's a use that's there right now. It's about solving a problem that's killing people and making people sick."

With respective backgrounds in food and IT, Locatis and his partner at Templar, Steve Stroud, licensed the technology for exclusive use in the food industry in partnership with Beacon Biotechnology.

IN A NUTSHELL: The patented BrightSPOT Pathogen Detection System utilizes a disposable USB-compatible device that tests samples for different food-borne pathogens with a "micro-miniature optical device." Locatis says the technology detects "all of the regretfully popular pathogens," including salmonella, E. coli and listeria.

"There is no instrument required," Locatis says. "It's a chip. It looks like a USB thumb drive and is a throwaway device." Employees at meat-processing plants swab surfaces, and instead of sending the samples to outside labs for testing--a process that requires a petri dish and 48 to 72 hours, if not longer--they wipe the swab on the device's port and plug it into a PC or PDA and get results "in a matter of minutes," he says.

The product can save users from costly recalls of contaminated goods, but can also allow companies to dump their current "quarantine-and-hold" strategy, he adds, noting that waiting for test results on a big delivery of meat can cost as much as $1 million daily. "There are a lot of different testing schemes, but they all take hours to perform. Speed and accuracy...