We are pleased to announce that Agnieszka Korzeniowska-Kowal, PhD, from Laboratory of Medical Microbiology, has been selected as a recipient of the international competition “5th EU-LAC Joint Call in STI 2025.” By decision of the Director of the National Centre for Research and Development, she has been awarded funding for the project “Modular Microfluidic Platform for Applications in Agriculture and Food Security—AgFoSec” . The grant will be carried out in a consortium with the Fraunhofer Society for the Promotion of Applied Research (Germany), the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences (Peru), the Santo Domingo Institute of Technology (Dominican Republic), and Marmara University (Turkey). The German organization is the project coordinator, and the amount awarded to IITD is 1,186,881.18 PLN.

The goal of the project is to develop and validate an innovative point-of-care (PoC) diagnostic platform based on microfluidics, combining biosensors and advanced CC12a technology with the PCR nucleic acid amplification method to detect microbial resistance. The diagnostic system will utilize a miniaturized “lab-on-a-chip” microfluidic platform containing specialized chambers for pathogen concentration to increase detection sensitivity. Following mechanical homogenization and filtration of the test samples, rapid bacterial lysis on the chip and the PCR amplification process will take place, further increasing the speed and reliability of the diagnosis. The AgFoSec POC system will be implemented, tested, and validated for screening agricultural (river water) and food (milk) samples.

In this way, AgFoSec contributes to addressing the urgent global public health challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and the spread of pathogens in the environment, agriculture, and food.

Congratulations!