Xibus captures $1m

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has offically spun out US-based Xibus Systems with $1m of seed funding from undisclosed investors to commercialise a food pathogen sensor technology.
Founded in late-2018, Xibus Systems is working on an approach that exploits droplets known as Janus emulsions which have been modified with synthetic particles to flag up bacterial contaminations in food.
The droplets contain two equally-sized hemispheres – one blue-tinted fluorocarbon and the other a red-tinted hydrocarbon. The hemispheres are able to bind to specific bacterial proteins, thus outputting either blue or red in response to the presence or absence of a given bacteria.
Xibus Systems is working on two products powered by the Janus emulsion technology – a highly-sensitive portable handheld device for industrial customers and a smartphone sensor that would be marketed to consumers.
The platform is expected to provide fast results at low cost. Other rapid food pathogen identification techniques typically use specialised instruments that are difficult to procure, slowing their effectiveness and risking delays between sampling and contaminant detection.
Xibus’s technology is based on MIT research co-led by Tim Swager, a principal investigator and the John D MacArthur professor of chemistry, and Alexander Klibanov, the Novartis professor of biological engineering and chemistry.
They were assisted by others including Kent Harvey, a former member of the Swager research group, Mathias Kolle, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Sara Nagelberg, one of Kolle’s graduate students.
Swager said: “We were thrilled by the design. It is a completely new sensing method that could really transform the food safety sensing market.”