Mecconti to join ATCC in its Microbiology Products Quality Program
The American Type Culture collection (ATCC), has today announced the addition of the Luxembourg-based microbiology firm Mecconti s.a.r.l. to the ATCC Licensed Derivative(R) program. This initiative is aimed at improving the quality of microbiology products and protecting consumers impacted by them.
The license agreement between ATCC and Mecconti represents a major expansion of ATCC’s Licensed Derivative (LD) program for European quality control professionals and consumers.
The LD program assures QC microbiologists that commercial products bearing the LD emblem contain microorganisms with confirmed identity, viability and purity.
For-profit companies who claim to incorporate ATCC biomaterials into their own commercial products but are not part of the LD program do not comply with ATCC’s quality controls and often violate ATCC’s material transfer agreement. Any claims made by the companies about the equivalence of the microorganisms in their products directly to ATCC strains are unsubstantiated because ATCC does not test them.
ATCC VP for Licensing, Contracts and Compliance Dr. Jesus Soriano said “Quality control professionals need to know with certainty that the materials at the foundation of their testing are viable, pure and correctly identified. By purchasing materials that carry the Licensed Derivative emblem, customers can trust that the characteristics of the ATCC-derived microorganisms have been maintained and confirmed until they reach the end users.”
“As a public science organization, ATCC takes very seriously our responsibility to try to ensure the safety and quality of the materials we provide,” Soriano added.
“In joining ATCC’s effort and passing their rigorous evaluation of our quality control process, our customers can be assured that our family of microorganisms is derived directly from ATCC cultures and is controlled to maintain its identity, purity and viability in products used in the industrial, clinical or environmental setting,” Mecconti President Dr. Gerhard Huecker said.
ATCC is the world’s largest biological resource center and the most comprehensive source of standard reference cultures and reagents used by life science researchers in academic, government and industrial laboratories.
Mecconti develops freeze-dried microorganism products and dehydrated culture media for use in quality control testing of pharmaceutical, biotech and food/beverage products manufactured around the world.
