Iranian Firm Provides Lab Services to Monitor Quality of Street Food, Beverages

“Our company provides laboratory services in the field of evaluation of food health monitoring, environment and health and public health,” said Erfan Aqajani, a researcher at the company.

“Due to the hot season, where the growth of bacteria and fungi is high, we monitor the food health and have prepared various tests in the two fields of microbiological and chemical to monitor the health of food, environment and the personnel,” he added.

“These tests are for the quality assessment of all types of food like meat, rice, grains, legumes, additives and beverages, specially the drinking water, because the transfer of contamination through drinking water is more than other foods that are cooked,” Aqajani said.

In another development in May, experts at an Iranian company operating in the field of genetic and cellular engineering had managed to produce a broad range of diagnostics and extraction kits and have offered them to laboratories across the country.

Fazel Gorjipour, the managing director of the knowledge-based company, pointed to the specialized activity in the field of genetics and the production of recombinant proteins and antibodies with research, diagnostic and therapeutic applications in their company, and added, “Considering the interdisciplinary nature of biotechnologies, our activities are related to various fields such as biomaterials, nanomaterials, cell therapies, smart drug delivery and biosensors.”

“At the beginning, the experts at this company focused their production activities on the production of kits for measuring cytokines and biomarkers based on ELISA, and continued to offer to the market products such as the cell death detection kit using the flow cytometry method,” he added.

“During the Covid-19 pandemic, our company was one of the first groups that produced spike antigens of the coronavirus in a recombinant form in mammalian cell hosts. These antigens are the active ingredient of recombinant vaccines and also its RBD part is used as antigen of antibody assay kits to check vaccine immunogenicity,” the manager of the company said.

Gorjipour pointed to the production and supply of cellular and biological products, saying, “Currently, various types of biochemical solutions, cell culture, molecular kits, extraction of nucleic acids, antibodies, recombinant proteins and immunoassay-based kits are being done and produced in this company. Also, the interferon gamma release assay kit for detecting infection with the agent of tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis), also known as IGRA, is in the research and development phase in the company.”

“This kit is of particular importance due to the importance of rapid differential diagnosis in the population exposed to tuberculosis given the crisis of population movements in the surrounding countries and especially the eastern neighbors, which are among the areas with a high prevalence of tuberculosis. It controls the spread of this contagious respiratory disease,” he further said.

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