Revolutionary diagnostic platform wins top award

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Last month Invisible Sentinel won the category of Coolest Wine Product of the Year at the Innovation + Quality (IQ) 2015 at Napa Valley in California for their ground breaking Veriflow BRETT.

Last month Invisible Sentinel won the category of Coolest Wine Product of the Year at the Innovation + Quality (IQ) 2015 at Napa Valley in California for their ground breaking Veriflow BRETT.

Last month Invisible Sentinel won the category of Coolest Wine Product of the Year at the Innovation + Quality (IQ) 2015 at Napa Valley in California for their ground breaking Veriflow BRETT.

Ben Pascal, chief executive of Invisible Sentinel says that he is incredibly happy to see how Veriflow BRETT has been embraced. “It’s truly been amazing to see how fast the technology has been adopted on a global scale. We’re honored to have been selected as one of the coolest products of the year, but importantly it highlights the growing awareness of the impact Brettanomyces has on the quality of wine. A product has never existed for winemakers that could be used at the winery with minimal training, delivering same day results during all processes of wine making, including fermentation, and at an affordable cost to a winery.”

“We developed a platform technology called Veriflow that allows us to make molecular detection accessible to everyone. Not only do we significantly reduce the costs of using a molecular test, but importantly we have improved benefits in terms of workflow, speed, and accuracy.”

“Additionally, we build our tests to suit the needs of our clients. Veriflow BRETT was designed specifically to address the pain points for Jackson Family wines in management of Brettanomyces in the winery. Our brewPAL test has been designed in partnership with Victory Brewing Company to address the limitations of Pediococcus and Lactobacillus testing in the beer industry. We’ve found partnering with key opinion leaders in industry and working closely with them during our designing and validation stage allows us to bring a product to the market that truly solves problems.”

Ben says that Veriflow BRETT’s initial impetus was driven by one of the largest winemakers in the world. “The science director for Jackson Family Wines of Sonoma California, Torey Arvik, approached us to design the test. Jackson Family was already employing standard methods for Brettanomyces detection including culture plating, PCR analysis, volatile phenol analysis, and organolleptic analysis (smell).”

“They understood the value in a tool that could deliver same-day accurate results, be deployed for minimal cost and with minimal training at any winery, and that was affordable – something none of the current methodology could fully accomplish.”

“Veriflow is the culmination of our work together. Eliminating sample preparation associated with removal of phenolic compounds wasn’t easy, but we achieved this allowing simple liquid transfer to be the most complex part of the method. It also allows us to reliably run young wines – wines coming off of fermentation and wines that have never been racked. By allowing winemakers to reliably test all steps in wine production, wineries are catching Brett before volatile phenol production occurs or before it ever reaches sensory detection levels, building trends of where Brett typically enters their winery, and preserving the value of their wine.”

Invisible Sentinel is already in the process of developing new diagnostic tests for the wine industry. “The test has been so well accepted, our clients are asking us for more tests. This summer we will release winePAL for Pediococcus and Lactobacillus in wine. We will continue to develop additional products in the order of market need,” Ben says.

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