Protecting Consumers from Contamination

This year, Soft Flow – present in Hungary for almost three decades – celebrates five years of Danish ownership by FOSS, a global provider of high-tech analytical solutions used mainly in the agricultural and food industries. The company, headquartered in Pécs, southern Hungary, boasts the world's first fully automated multimycotoxin measuring instrument based on its own microbead technology.

Regarding developments that have occurred at Soft Flow in the past five years with FOSS being the owners, the company’s Managing Director, Dr. Simon Armbruszt highlights to Diplomacy&Trade that Soft Flow was a purely biotechnology research and development company at the time of the 2016 acquisition. “Today, this field is still the most dominant, but since then, our activities have covered all the disciplines needed for analytical instrument development. In addition to the basic immunoassay development profile, we are now equipped with all the state-of-the-art binding agent development techniques. For this, we have built a very strong molecular biology team and we brought microbiology into our activities as well. Our analytical procedures are no longer focused solely on the flow cytometry platform, but we have developed a number of other detection platforms. In terms of application, mycotoxin analysis remains a central area, where our market solution is now available: the MycoFOSSTM is the world's first fully automated multimycotoxin measuring instrument based on our microbead technology. The process has so far been validated for wheat and maize and will be extended to a number of additional food and feed matrices in the coming years.”
He adds that it is also a major achievement that they have set up a reference laboratory where they can help the development of new instruments with accredited level validation measurements. “In addition to biotechnology, we have also built up a very strong team of software developers who are involved in the development of various new instruments, either as front-end, back-end, or embedded developers. And the great novelty of 2021 is that we have also become involved in hardware development. For now, we only have a small but already very competent team of mechanical, electrical and simulation engineers.”

New center of excellence
Early this November, Soft Flow inaugurated a new center of excellence in Pécs (see picture). Talking about the significance of this new center in the life of the company, the Managing Director points out that their previous lab was also biosafety level licensed and they could perform genetic research, but the entire infrastructure was very outdated and they have used every square inch of it. “In the new building, the biotechnology research and development will be implemented on almost twice the floor area, at a far higher standard. And we also have new lab units that haven’t existed before, such as dedicated microbiology laboratory, lateral-flow laboratory, hardware and software laboratory.”

Smarter management of mycotoxin risks
Soft Flow is a leading biotechnology firm in the field of the development of food and feed safety analytical solutions. As to where consumers can encounter the company’s ‘presence’ when they purchase food items, for instance, Dr. Simon Armbruszt explains that, the MycoFOSSTM solution released in March 2021, and which is hitherto the only solution that combines Soft Flow biotechnology with FOSS engineering, provides smarter management of mycotoxin risks in the grain industry. For grain producers and flour millers, protecting consumers from the harmful effects of mycotoxin contamination is of utmost importance. “The fast, accurate and reliable results we provide make it easier for producers to check contamination levels and match international food safety requirements. For feed millers, the threat of mycotoxin contamination of crops must be handled already at raw material intake. Using MycoFOSSTM helps them make better decisions about when to safely accept raw material, segregate products or take calculated risks when adding toxin binders.”

Close collaboration with the mother company
Slow Flow has its own reference laboratory in Pécs. The only ‘client’ of this lab is FOSS, as Soft Flow is an exclusive partner for the mother company. “We develop solutions for commercial labs, therefore we do not have business in the field of our clients. In the development phase, the measuring units have to be validated against reference samples. It makes a lot of sense to produce these data in-house, we have more control and more insights in this way,” the Managing Director stresses.

Universities as supply of talents
In his Diplomacy&Trade interview, the Danish ambassador to Hungary, Erik Vilstrup Lorenzen called attention to Soft Flow’s partnership with the University of Pécs. In that regard, Dr. Simon Armbruszt highlights that they have two key strategic partners in Hungary: the University of Pécs and the Agricultural Biotechnology Research Institute of the Hungarian University of Agricultural and Life Sciences in Gödöllő. “First of all, it is a huge pool for the supply of talents. For this reason, we have established an external department at the Faculty of Science in Pécs, and we are also involved in the education program of chemists and biologists. Another area of the collaboration is that there are some biotech services where we simply need external partners, because it makes no sense to make large investments for certain measurements. We also use the animal facility of the university, though here, we made big steps to develop animal-free methodologies. We are relatively independent in the field of research and development, we do not require the involvement of external resources, but there are some early phase feasibility studies or methodological side tracks where we are happy to involve academic research groups in the work,” the Managing Director concludes.