Innovative Testing Methods for Gluten in Foods for Celiac Disease Patients

The team has developed an antibody that was grown in the body of mice and later extracted. it's created to latch onto the protein molecules inside of gluten. When coming across a food that is suspected to contain gluten, a small sample would be placed inside a container of liquid that would be a part of the easily transportable M&M’s packet sized kit. The kit also comes with test strips that would then be placed inside the liquid. If the presence of gluten is detected the proteins latch onto the gluten build up on the strip and it starts to turn pink, much like a pregnancy test. 

So far the prototype tester has only been able to detect small amounts of gluten and it takes hours rather than minutes to get a result at this point in testing. They believe that with some tweaks in the chemical makeup of the test should provide faster testing results and they still have a fair amount of technical challenges as well. But, they are close to a solution that will enable them to not only take the gluten tester to market soon, but to start production and roll out other food allergen testers.