Providing sustainable solutions to Vietnam’s prawn farming and food security

[HO CHI MINH CITY] When prawn farmers in Vietnam need to detect diseases in their harvest, they usually have to send samples of the crustaceans and the water to a laboratory hundreds of kilometres away. The testing process would take several days.

Singaporean Kit Yong and Vietnamese Michael Nguyen – two National University of Singapore (NUS) graduates who founded a biotech startup called Forte Biotech two years ago – have come up with a disease surveillance kit that allows farmers to get these test results within an hour or so.

The duo joined the university’s graduate research innovation programme and set up a site at the NUS Agritech Centre to develop a portable diagnostic kit called Rapid – short for Robust Accurate Prawn Infection Detector.