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Nima: new portable peanut and gluten tester could be a lifesaver for food allergy sufferers

Having a peanut, or any food allergy makes eating out a frustrating experience. You’re regularly greeted with questions on how serious the allergy is, could you die, and statements on how there is no guarantee the food you eat won’t have come into contact with the allergen.

Aside from regularly dealing with the anxiety that comes with these interactions, there’s also the problems with the current global Epi-pen shortage to contend with.

But imagine if there was a way to test your food, to have a portable food lab that could offer that little bit of extra support when it came to eating out?

That’s the idea behind Nima. Co-founder Shireen Yates was inspired to create a portable food-testing device after being diagnosed with food intolerances to gluten, dairy, egg and soy, during university.

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Her diet obviously had to change but it was particularly difficult when eating out. “I was ordering gluten-free food and being super careful, but it was sneaking in my diet,” Yates tells the Standard. “I could tell by the way my body was responding.”

It was during her time studying an MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that the idea for Nima began to take shape. Yates was at a wedding when she asked a waiter if the appetisers were gluten-free and faced the usual line: how sick will gluten make you, and how the kitchen couldn’t guarantee the ingredients.

“It was in that moment that I thought wouldn’t it be amazing if I could take one additional data point and know and have that [information] in the palm of my hand? That’s what inspired Nima.”

How Nima works

To test food for traces, you need to have a Nima device and either a gluten or a peanut capsule. You take a pea-sized amount of the food, put it in the capsule, and place it into the sensor where it kicks into action.

A test-strip inside the capsule is covered in antibodies, which binds to either a gluten or peanut protein if it’s present in the sample. The device displays a smiley face if there if the sample is allergy-free, or a little wheat or peanut illustration if traces have been found.

As well as the device, there is an app where people can record their findings. The aim is this will build up to a map full of places to eat and specific dishes, offering data points across the city for fellow allergy sufferers.

Yates says the sensing technology for Nima isn’t new, it’s the same tech that has been used in pregnancy tests for over 50 years. Yet, what is different about the device is it is taking those food tests usually done under lab conditions, and making it possible for consumers to do tests in a fast and portable way.

It took a while to get bring the chemistry, the hardware and the software of the Nima device together. For Yates, along with her co-founder Scott Sundvor, an MIT engineer, it took around three years to get the device to market to work for gluten. This arrived in 2016, whilst the peanut version became available earlier this year.

Nima co-founder and CEO Shireen Yates (Nima)
Nima co-founder and CEO Shireen Yates (Nima)

Alongside getting the tech right, they also needed to prove the science. The team carried out thousands of food tests, spiking foods to known levels of peanut and gluten and then testing the Nima results against a lab kit. Yates says they then sent these results to third-party labs to be tested.

The company has a scientific advisory board made up of professionals and researchers in healthcare and recently participated in a study with the Columbia Coeliac Disease Centre using the app’s data. “They made this really interesting finding whereby one out of three times something was supposed to be gluten-free, it tested positive for gluten,” explains Yates. If there’s ever an argument for a device like Nima, that’s it.

Don’t leave your Epi-Pens at home

Nima is a genius idea for offering, as Yates explains, that extra data point, but it’s not meant to completely protect you from never eating gluten or peanuts again.

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For starters, it won’t work certain items such as anything fermented, including soy, tamarind, or pure chocolate. If a food has sesame seeds in it, it may flash up as containing peanuts falsely.

The price could put people off too: it’s £159 for the device, and 12 capsules costs around £49.99.

“We’re always figuring out how to make it better, including more affordable,” says Yates. “But for a first-time technology, we don’t expect the price to change for at least a year.”

The Nima device displays a peanut symbol if the allergen is dedicated (Nima)
The Nima device displays a peanut symbol if the allergen is dedicated (Nima)

The company has faced criticism that the device could encourage people to be reckless or leave their Epi-Pens at home. Yates is very clear that that’s not what Nima is intended to be. Besides, if you’ve ever met anyone with a food allergy, you know that being reckless when it comes to food is simply not in their nature.

“I sometimes hear critics say, oh people are going to go crazy, but have they ever talked to someone with a peanut allergy? They’re not going to go crazy, they’re going to use this to continue navigating how they’ve been doing their entire life, which is very carefully,” she says.

The next stage in Nima’s cycle is to create capsules and sensors for testing dairy and tree nuts, though eventually, the company will create a universal sensor so for people with multiple allergies, they only need to carry one sensor and the different capsules for specific food tests.

“The vision from day one was that everyone should have a portable lab and you should have the access to test anything you want for anything you’re interested in,” adds Yates.