bioMérieux Improves Food Safety Testing Workflow with VIDAS® Heat and Go

Dry heating block enhances safety, traceability and productivity for pathogen detection in food industry

Marcy l’Etoile, France - December 5, 2007. Food industry professionals will now benefit from increased productivity for pathogen detection. bioMérieux, a world leader in industrial microbiology, is launching VIDAS® Heat and Go, a dry heating block used to heat samples undergoing pathogen testing in bioMérieux’s automated VIDAS and mini VIDAS® systems.

“There is a clear need for improved productivity and traceability for microbiological control testing in the food industry and developing innovative solutions to address these needs is at the core of our strategy,” said Alexandre Mérieux, Corporate Vice President, Industrial Microbiology, bioMérieux. “VIDAS Heat and Go significantly reduces technician handling time as well as material cost, while standardizing a previously cumbersome step in pathogen detection.”

Food sample cultures are heated prior to testing to allow detection of the target organism. Prior to the VIDAS Heat and Go, a boiling water bath was typical protocol for heating food samples. Lab workers would manually label tubes and transfer samples in and out of the tubes and in and out of the boiling water bath. The VIDAS Heat and Go dry heating block streamlines this process by eliminating the manual steps of labeling and transferring the sample tubes.

The use of a dry heating block offers food laboratories increased safety in pathogen detection. The VIDAS Heat and Go provides enhanced traceability of sample results, eliminating the risk of mislabeling sample tubes. Additionally, the dry heating block ensures the appropriate temperature is maintained throughout the heating process.

About bioMérieux

Advancing Diagnostics to Improve Public Health
A world leader in the field of in vitro diagnostics for over 40 years, bioMérieux is present in more than 150 countries through 35 subsidiaries and a large network of distributors. In 2006, revenues reached €1.037 billion with 83% of sales outside of France.

bioMérieux provides diagnostic solutions (reagents, instruments, software), which determine the source of disease and contamination to improve patient health and ensure consumer safety. Our products are used for diagnosing infectious diseases and providing high medical value results for cardiovascular
emergencies and cancer screening and monitoring. They are also used for detecting microorganisms in agri-food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic products. bioMérieux is listed on Eurolist by Euronext. For more information, visit http://www.biomerieux.com/.