DuPont Nutrition & Health, a unit chemical giant EI DuPont de Nemours & Co. (DD), and South Korea-based leading diagnostic company Seegene Inc. has forged an agreement to jointly make highly multiplexed assays for food safety testing. The entities have not divulged the financial terms of the deal.
The agreement has marked the union of DuPont’s award-winning pathogen testing platform “BAX System” with Seegene’s novel molecular technologies including DPO and TOCE. The combination of Seegene’s technologies and DuPont’s detection systems will provide the food processing industry highly powerful tools for the detection of foodborne pathogens.
While the DPO technology generates consistently high specificity by eliminating primer competition, TOCE enables testing of multiple targets (multiplex testing) in a single fluorescence channel. The BAX system is among the most advanced pathogen testing system available today for food processing companies.
Under the pact, DuPont and Seegene will develop highly multiplexed, real-time Polymerase chain reaction (“PCR”) assays for fast detection and differentiation of at least 10 organisms from a single sample in a single test. The agreement marks the entry of Seegene’s multiplex molecular technologies into the foodsafety testing market. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), foodborne illness afflicts roughly 48 million Americans annually.
Seegene is a leading developer of multiplex molecular technologies and multiplex clinical molecular diagnostics. Its solutions are geared for detection of multi-pathogens with high reliability and throughput.
DuPont Nutrition & Health offers advanced molecular diagnostic systems which address the food safety challenges globally. It comprises Danisco’s (Danish food maker) world leading specialty food ingredients business, the Qualicon food safety and protection franchise, and Solae (a joint venture with Bunge Limited), which is a global leader in developing soy based technologies.
Revenues from DuPont Nutrition & Health more than doubled year over year in the most recent quarter to $808 million, boosted by the acquisition of Danisco’s enzyme business. The solid growth, in part, drove DuPont’s profits in the quarter.
We currently have a long-term Neutral recommendation on DuPont. The company, which competes with The Dow Chemical Company (DOW) and BASF SE (BASFY), holds a Zacks #3 Rank, which translates into a short-term (1 to 3 months) Hold rating.
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