Yesterday, at the closing session of COHiTEC 2013, FungiQ team, a student (Tiago Faria) and two graduated in Environmental Health (Marina Almeida Silva and Carla Viegas) and another in Clinical Analysis and Public Health (Filipa Ferreira), all of them from Lisbon School of Health Technology (ESTeSL), presented their product and business idea.
FungiQ team intends to solve the problem about the difficulty to identify and quantify fungal contamination in different contexts. This problem exists in different critical scenarios, namely indoor air quality, occupational exposure and patient safety. Their customers are labs with molecular biology technique and also indoor air quality and occupational exposure professionals, that needs a solution to help them to reduce or mitigate the costs of fungal exposure, and negative effects to human health.
Their product is a Kit based on molecular technique which aims to quantify total fungal load and also identify and quantify three other species of potential pathogenic fungus to human health. The Kit could be used to achieve the assessment of air, surfaces, water and soil fungal contamination and fungal contamination of building materials. This product is specific for different contexts according to customer needs, fast to give a result (24 hours), allows comparison with the guidelines since gives results in standard units rather than genomic units and a custom proprietary report (FungiQ Report).
Take a look at A Saúde Ambiental no COHiTEC (in portuguese) and our Photo Album in Facebook.
