COLLEGE STATION – Texas Agricultural Experiment Station has a new addition to its research capabilities. The agency recently signed an agreement with Titan Corp. accepting ownership of all equipment housed in the National Center for Electron Beam Food Research, located on the Texas A&M campus.
The center conducts food safety research utilizing state-of-the-art electron beam irradiation technologies. The equipment transfer comes in exchange for 400 hours of irradiation time to be used by Titan at the center over the next 18 months.
“This is an extraordinary agreement that will strengthen the National Center as an objective research center that can explore and expand the electronic irradiation technology,” said Dr. Mark McLellan, director of the Texas A&M Institute of Food Science and Engineering.
Gene W. Ray, chairman, president and CEO of Titan, committed to providing an electron beam research facility at Texas A&M University in 2000. McLellan said partway through the 10-year agreement SureBeam Co., the Titan spin-off firm responsible for the agreement, ceased operations and the equipment’s ownership reverted to Titan. With this new agreement, Titan has now transferred the equipment to the university.
McLellan said running the center after SureBeam ceased operations was a challenge. The facility is funded entirely by grants and contracts, which also pays the salaries of the four full-time staff required for operation.
“We survived the year financially by banking contract dollars from previous years,” he said. “We operate the National Center very much like a service center, and we have become highly independent in our technical expertise.”
Dr. Suresh Pillai, the facility’s food research director, said the center provides “an unparalleled array of research opportunities for academia and industry alike.
“The facility is the only one of its kind anywhere in the world that allows researchers to simulate the destruction of highly infectious organisms in true food processing scenarios,” Pillai said.
Food safety is of strategic importance to the United States, he said. A key component of the center’s activities revolves around education. The center wants to train the next generation of food scientists to prevent food-borne illnesses.
The center also holds practical trainings and research workshops for food industry professionals and federal agencies.
A university alone doesn’t always have the resources to conduct all types of research, and private companies alone don’t have the capacity to establish universal research centers, McLellan said. Constructing and equipping the same facility today would cost around $7 million.
“This continues to be a model for what is possible in a research partnership; Titan Corp. and Texas A&M are both winners,” McLellan said. “We now have a fully functional E-beam facility working with academic, government and industry researchers worldwide. With this agreement, Titan has teamed up with a strong research partner. Together we will help provide understanding of the systems and applications of this technology in the food and agribusiness sector.”
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