HKSQ Seminar on Food Toxicity using Fish Embryos

The seminar entitled "Food Toxicity using Fish Embryos" was organized by Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) and co-organizer by America Society for Quality (ASQ) – Hong Kong on 26th Jun 2015. The seminar aimed to share Vitargent’s ground-breaking transgenic medaka and zebrafish Fish Embryo Toxicity (FET) test technologies has the capability to screen more than 1,000 toxins at one time. Moreover, Vitargent got the “Grand Prize of the 43rd International Exhibition of Inventions of GENEVA” to using a system for detecting toxins in April 2015. In the beginning, I (Former Chairman, HKSQ) introduced our guest speaker Dr. Xueping Chen who studied PhD in BCH Department, City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and then performed 3 years post-doc. After 6 years research in CityU, Dr. Xueping Chen and another CityU student formed Start-up named “Vitargent (Int’l) Biotechnology Ltd.” since April 2010 and located in Hong Kong Science and Technology Park.

Dr. Xueping Chen (CTO, Vitargent) introduced the history and service of her company first. They were first and only accredited ISO 17025 testing lab in Asia offering in vivo toxicity screening methods.

Then Dr. Chen explained why market needs because consumer very concerned about the impact of chemicals used in their products on their health. However, traditional chemical testing was not enough to cover all harmful materials/chemicals.

After that Dr. Chen briefed her technologies that “Zebrafish share 70% of genes with humans and 84% of genes known to be associated with human disease have a zebrafish counterpart” and proven could test over 1,000+ human toxin at once, as well as, widely used in pharmaceutics industry.

The 1st patented transgenic Medaka Embryo test using 8 embryo per well and prepared test sample, negative control (e.g. water) and positive control (e.g. 1ppb, 3ppb, 5ppb, 8ppb, 10ppb) to form calibration curve. Moreover, their curve fitness R-sq was usually above 0.95. In their research, categories included Dairy products, Meat products, Drinks and Others.

Recently, cooking oil was concerned because of gutter oil incident that could not be found using traditional chemical method. The photo showed the abnormalities of the embryos if oil contained harmful toxin.

Finally, Dr. Chen introduced their business model included “Safe Products Testing Provider”, “Safe Products Quality Consultant” and “Safe Products Brand Builder”. Lastly, she mentioned their focus areas involved Cosmetics, Dairy, Edible Oil, Meat & Seafood and Water.

Q&A Session:

Mr. Peter Fung (Chairman, HKSQ) presented a souvenir to Dr. Xueping Chen.

Before end of the seminar, Dr. Albert Tsang (Former Chairman, HKSQ) introduced some coming activities such as ASQ Certification Program Introduction and HKSQ AGM talk about Zero Defect.

Reference:
HKSQ - www.hksq.org
HKSTP News - HKSTP companies bring home the highest global recognitions on innovation & HKSTP supports Vitargent to achieve laboratory accreditation
CityU News - Alumni win top international award with biotech invention