Rapid Testing to Detect Johne’s Disease

Early detection can save the dairy industry hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Menlo Park, CA — The scientific team at LamdaGen Corporation announced today that feasibility testing for rapid detection of Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP), the causative agent for Johne’s disease in dairy cows, has been completed. Johne’s disease causes rapid weight loss as well as greatly reduced milk production, and costs the dairy industry hundreds of millions of dollars in losses each year.

The Company’s Optical Enhancement System (OES), easily monitored via the naked-eye, is able to detect antibodies to MAP in both milk and serum samples from infected cows in less than one hour. Current technologies take several days to weeks for results to be reported, time during which the potentially infected animals have to be cared for and isolated. In addition, medical researchers are considering the possibility that Johne’s Disease can be linked to Crohn’s Disease, a debilitating gastrointestinal disease in humans, which affects over 500,000 people in the United States alone.

The use of dairy cows that are no longer suitable for milking in American ground beef production opens the possibility that those cows have one or more infections, including Johne’s Disease. Increasing public awareness of the vulnerability of beef production to disease is pushing the need for a methodology that will confirm of the safety of our beef supply. The Lamdagen OES, a rapid, visual and cost-effective tool for field testing a cow before it enters the food chain will benefit both industry and consumers.

LamdaGen Corporation, a privately funded company located in Menlo Park, California, is a rapidly growing Life Science Company that produces proprietary Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance (LSPR) bio-sensors to facilitate Medical Diagnostics and Life-Science.
For more information regarding LamdaGen Corporation, please visit www.lamdagen.com