| fastrAK uses familiar culture and immunomagnetic methods combined with groundbreaking AK Phage technology, and compared with other rapid techniques has a lower cost per test, detects viable cells, kills the pathogen and reduces the risk of contamination. Extremely easy to use in the laboratory, the assay has a total 'hands on' time of less than 15 minutes. It comprises two levels of specificity: an immunomagnetic bead separation (IMS) to capture the food pathogen of interest from pre-enrichment broths, and bacteriophage lysis to release intracellular AK from the target cells in a highly specific manner. A powerful amplification step uses the AK released to mediate the conversion of ADP to ATP and is measured as visible light by the resulting bioluminescent reaction. This 100-fold amplification process of Alaska's novel technology is key to the high degree of sensitivity of the assay and the fastest Time To Result (TTR) of 18 hours. |