Press Release: Micro Imaging Technology

MIT 1000 LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN TO OBTAIN STRATEGIC DISTRIBUTION AND MANUFACTURING PARTNERS

San Clemente, CA. June 16, 2009….Micro Imaging Technology, Inc. (OTC:BB “MMTC”) announced that it has launched a campaign to obtain strategic partners for both distribution and manufacturing of its MIT 1000 Rapid Microbial Identification (ID) System.

By recently obtaining Performance Test Method (PTM) Certification for the ID of Listeria from the AOAC Research Institute (RI), the first step in MIT’s commercialization strategy has been accomplished, allowing the Company to initiate sales into the targeted food safety market. MIT next plans to improve its market position with additional Certifications and product improvements. In parallel, the Company plans to create a worldwide distribution network and establish a high quality (e.g. ISO 9000) manufacturing process.
MIT will use its expertise to enhance the System and improve its market position by securing additional AOAC RI PTM Certifications for the ID of E.coli and Salmonella this year. The MIT 1000 will then be certified for the identification of the three bacteria that are responsible for most of the food bacterial contamination events worldwide. To accelerate profitable growth, MIT plans to complement its internal efforts with strategic partners rather than organically grow the Company. Discussions have been initiated with several worldwide distribution leaders in the food industry and a local, well known, global ISO 9000 manufacturer that could also assist in reducing the System’s material cost.

“Our goal is to have our strategic partners in place later this year enabling us to obtain several million dollars of profitable revenue in the food safety market next year. In addition, we plan to have strategic partners assist us in entering the pharmaceutical and clinical diagnostic markets in 2011,” stated Michael Brennan, MIT’s Chairman and CEO.

Over $3 billion is spent for rapid microbial identification in the food safety market annually and is rising at nearly 10 percent per year. Expansion to the pharmaceutical and clinical diagnostic markets is estimated to add over $2 billion to MIT’s addressable market.

ABOUT MICRO IMAGING TECHNOLOGY:
MIT is a California-based public company that has developed and patented a rapid microbial ID System that can revolutionize the pathogenic ID process and annually save thousands of lives and tens of millions of dollars. The System IDs bacteria in minutes, not days, and at a significant per test cost savings when compared to any conventional method. It does not rely on chemical or biological agents, conventional processing, fluorescent tags, gas chromatography or DNA analysis. The process is totally GREEN requiring only clean water and a sample of the unknown bacteria. Revenues for all rapid testing methods exceed $5 billion annually – with food safety accounting for over $3 billion - having expanded at a rate of 9.2 percent annually since 1998. Current growth projections are at 30 percent annually with test demands driven by major health, safety and homeland security issues.

The System is laser based and uses the proven principles of light scattering in conjunction with proprietary PC-based software algorithms to ID microbes and create a proprietary database. MIT, through independent testing, has proven the ability with high accuracy to ID the most dangerous and pervasive pathogens; E. coli, Listeria, Salmonella, and Staphylococcus aureus (a.k.a. Staph) and twenty (20) other species of bacterium.

The MIT 1000 System has numerous ID applications including food quality control, clinical diagnostics, pharmaceutical quality assurance, semiconductor processing control and water quality monitoring. MIT has chosen to focus initial efforts on food quality control as recent events have created an urgent demand for quicker and cheaper testing – demands that will promote a high-value return on any investment in MIT’s technology.

Please visit our web site: www.micro-imaging.com

For financial data and information, visit:
http://globalfinancialwire.com/2009/06/micro-imaging-technology/

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This release contains statements that are forward-looking in nature. Statements that are predictive in nature, that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions or that include words such as “expects,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “estimates,” and similar expressions are forward-looking statements. These statements are made based upon information available to the Company as of the date of this release, and we assume no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results could differ materially from our current expectations. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to dependence on suppliers; short product life cycles and reductions in unit selling prices; delays in development or shipment of new products; lack of market acceptance of our new products or services; inability to continue to develop competitive new products and services on a timely basis; introduction of new products or services by major competitors; our ability to attract and retain qualified employees; inability to expand our operations to support increased growth; and declining economic conditions, including a recession. These and other factors and risks associated with our business are discussed from time to time within our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Microchip detects Malaria in minutes

Scientists from Glasgow University claim they have created a device which can detect malaria within minutes. Doctors have welcomed the development as more travellers go abroad without taking proper precautions against the disease. The flu-like symptoms can be missed until the patient is critically ill.

Scientists at the university have announced an electronic microchip that can detect the type of malaria infecting a patient and find out whether the malaria is resistant to first line drugs. Blood samples are placed in the microchip, which is designed to detect the strain of disease. This means the best drug can be used to treat it.

The university claims that it is the only malaria study of its kind in the U.K. to use the technology. Those with malaria suffer from flu-like symptoms that can go unnoticed until they are critically ill.

“Since 2000, an average of 1700 Britons have been diagnosed with the disease every year, although the number of actual cases is thought to be much higher through under reporting,” the statement from the university said.

Dr. Lisa Ranford-Cartwright is leading the team working on the project by using the new lab-on-a-chip technology that is expected to help doctors treat the disease more quickly as more number of incidences are being reported by the health professionals.

At present, the diagnostic test takes up to 48 hours to determine whether a patient has malaria and even then, doctors are unable to tell whether the parasite is drug resistant, according to her.

“In certain cases, a malaria diagnosis has to be confirmed by DNA amplification which can take another one to two days. The only current way to test for drug resistance is to give patients certain drugs and wait to see if they work,” Ranford-Cartwright said in a statement.

She added, “Our malaria chip should be able to do the whole process in less than 60 minutes, and we hope that by the end of our development project we will have reduced this time further.”

According to the World Health Organization, almost half of the world’s population is at risk of malaria, and an estimated 247 million cases led to nearly 881,000 deaths in 2006.

Malaria is most prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of south-east Asia and it claims the life of a child every 30 seconds. Its symptoms include a fever and chronic exhaustion, which can turn in to a severe form called cerebral malaria that is caused by Plasmodium falciparum and is considered to be fatal mainly due to late diagnosis.

Malaria transmission in the United States was successfully thwarted in the 1950s. There were 1,505 reported cases of malaria in 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Last year a study revealed more cases of the most dangerous type of malaria than ever before are being brought back to the UK from trips abroad. The Health Protection Agency study identified 6,753 cases of falciparum malaria diagnosed between 2002 and 2006. Experts said many of the cases arose from visits to west Africa made by people visiting relatives and friends.

Project leader Dr Lisa Ranford-Cartwright said: “The current way of diagnosing is using a blood smear on a slide and examining it on a microscope. That will take a good microscopist a good hour to reach a diagnosis, it’s extremely difficult to make that diagnosis accurately. The chip can give us a result in as little as half an hour.”

Dr Heather Ferguson, a malaria researcher, picked up the disease in southern Kenya and it was only spotted by chance when she was giving a blood sample. She said: “Had I not been diagnosed at that moment and caught it within the next 24 hours all those millions of parasites would have replicated one more time, making eight times as many as there had been before, which could very easily have been lethal.”

via BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Glasgow, Lanarkshire and West | Doctors welcome malaria microchip and http://www.vitabeat.com/scientists-develop-microchip-to-detect-malaria-within-minutes/v/10017/

Stem-Cell Repair Kit for Strokes

A novel matrix of neural stem cells and biodegradable polymer PLGA developed at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London can quickly repair brain damage from stroke in rats, growing new nerve tissue to fill stroke-induced cavities in just seven days.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22263/?a=f

Posted by - at 12.3.09

Thanks to Bill Barry at ubervidabasecamp

Digital Divide Data (DDD)

Digital Divide Data (DDD) is a social enterprise bridging the divide that separates young people from opportunity in Cambodia and Laos by providing disadvantaged youth with:

The education and training they need to deliver world-class, competitively priced IT services to global clients and acquire the essential business skills that help them break the cycle of poverty.

DDD is an innovative, internationally acclaimed non-profit organization that operates with a strong business model and has already generated more than $2.5million in revenues.

Their focus on economic sustainability allows us to reinvest our profits in social and economic programs that deliver lasting change for our employees and their communities. Over the past six years, DDD have trained more than 1000 people with marketable skills, and more than 200 of their staff have graduated from entry-level jobs to employment opportunities that earn them six times the average income in Cambodia.

UltraFuture is seeking partners to develop similar programs in developing economies and regions such as northeastern and southwestern China. To learn more, please contact info@ultrafutureworld.com

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End to Paralysis with Artificial Brain-to-Muscle Connectors

Using a computerized connector between the brain and muscles in the body, scientists have been able to restore movement to paralyzed limbs. A group of neuroscientists report in Nature today that they used a brain-computer interface to join the motor cortex of an ape to the muscles in its wrist.

read more | digg story

The Future of Computer-assisted Cognitive Therapy

Cognitive therapy is one of the most researched types of brain training, especially in dealing with depression and anxiety. Why don’t more people benefit today from it? The lack of a scalable distribution model may perhaps explain that. Researchers predict that technology will help complement the role of therapists, helping more people better cope with change, life, anxiety, and a range of cognitive and emotional challenges. Without any stigma. Just as naturally as one trains abdominal muscles today.

Visit SharpBrains.com to learn more.

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ID’ing microbes with lasers for safer food and water supplies

Micro Imaging Technology (MIT) is a California based company that has developed and patented a technology for rapid microbe identification. The MIT product and system (the MIT 1000) can identify different species of pathogenic bacteria like E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and Staphylococcus, just minutes after culturing. The costs of testing are on average 20 times cheaper than current procedures, and can be accomplished in a fraction of the time. The potential is for more widespread testing, resulting in safer suppliers of food, pharmaceuticals and water. The cost advantage makes this particularly relevant to developing and under-developed nations.

The MIT 1000 device uses a laser and the principles of light scattering to discriminate various bacteria cells that are suspended in filtered water. Incident laser light both reflects off the bacteria’s outer surface and penetrates the body of the bacterium. The light interacts with any structural features and eventually emerges from inside the cell. These light patterns are unique for each bacterial species and thereby create a signature that is captured and stored in a computer data base.

The MIT 1000 features 35 photo detectors that surround the sample vial and collect light scattering intensities that are generated when a cell intersects the laser beam. The scattering values collected by the detectors are statistically analyzed by MIT’s proprietary software that contains an extensive database of values for each bacteria seen by the photo detectors. Identification occurs when 10-50 organisms are analyzed, and typically takes less than 10 minutes.

The MIT 1000 can be used in the following applications:

Food & Beverage
Food quality control
Source & process water quality control
Complement and eventually replace expensive lab testing
Pharmaceutical
Source & process water quality control
Defense
Periodic monitoring of water in remote or potentially hazardous environments
Water Utilities
Complement to regulated lab analysis when quick results are desired – can shorten confirmation time from 3 days to 8 hours
Semiconductor
Wafer fabrication process water
Hospitals
Cooling tower water and condensation
Clinical labs
Standard microbial ID testing

MIT is a development stage company, (OTCBB “MMTC”) that seeks to become a global leader in the detection and identification of microbrial organisms. The company has convened a noteworthy Science Advisory Board (SAB) that includes academic and industry leaders such as:

Ralph Emerson - BOD member & chairman of the SAB is a noted microbiologist who has held academic and research position at UC Irvine Medical and UC Davis

Kary Mullis – Nobel Prize Winning Chemist who invented PCR

Richard Walker - UC Davis Professor & Director of Animal & FoodSafety Lab

Edward Ackerman –Senior scientist at Pacific Northwest Labs.

First biological brain to controls its own robotic body

A team of engineers, neuro-physiologists and other researchers have developed a robot that is controlled by a biological brain made of cultured neurons. This cutting edge research is being conducted at the University of Reading. The main focus of the research is to study how memories manifest themselves in the brain, and how brains store specific pieces of data. This research will provide a better framework for understanding and potentially treating diseases and disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, stroke and brain injury. Fascinating research, highly relevant to our aging societies where neurological disorders will become increasingly prevalent.

If you would like more information about this research, please contact Dr. Lucy Chappell of the University of Reading by phone at +44 0118 378 7391 or 0751 518 8751 or via email l.chappell@reading.ac.uk

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VIDEO: Woman Has Puppies Cloned From Dead Dog

A South Korean biotechnology firm has successfully cloned five pit bull puppies. RNL Bio in Seoul has said that said this was the first commercial order of its kind.
Bernann McKinney asked the company to make clones of her pet dog, Booger, who died in 2006. McKinney relied heavily on her pet for help after losing some of her fingers.

How much is that cloned puppy in the window? RNL Bio charged McKinney between 50,000 and 100,000 U.S dollars for the process.

The following video is from a newscast announcing the successful cloning. The clone announcement is in the last 20 seconds of this one minute clip.

Photo Copyright Getty Images

Transhumanism and the Olympics

Maintaining a ‘level’ playing field in competitive sport becomes increasingly complex as technological advances provide athletes with superior training methods, equipment, supplements (dietary or otherwise) and enhancements. Equipment such as biomimetically designed swimming suits, for example, are monitored and regulated with increasing precision. In a landmark ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, 21 year old South African athlete Oscar Pistorius was approved to compete in Olympic Games against able-bodied athletes. The ‘Bladerunner’ (nicknamed after the carbon-fibre prosthetics he uses in place of his amputated lower legs) plans to compete in either the Beijing Olympics or London Olympics in 2012. As a result of the ruling, much debate has ensued around questions of fairness, equality and the ‘purity’ of sport.

While anabolic steroids and other doping techniques are widely deemed to be unfair in Olympic competition, we have unquestionably reached a turning point in prosthetic medical science when a ‘disabled’ athlete is perceived as having a potentially unfair advantage over able-bodied (read species-typical) competitors.

Developments in science and technology lead to products that alter the nature of competition in existing sports and often spawn the creation of new sports. These developments also influence social attitudes and values. Enhancements and modifications of athletes bodies and their equipment affect performance capabilities, competitive pressure and societal expectations.

Many modern internal and external enhancements of the human body go beyond the ’species-typical’. Whether undergoing plastic surgery aimed at improving physical attractiveness, or anabolic steroids aimed at improving physical size and power, these enhancements and their undeniable impact on performance lead to a culture of increasing demand and paradoxically enable cultures of both acceptance and rejection.

These improvements of the human body (structural, functional, abilities) bring us beyond our species-typical limits. This contributes to the development of new social concepts such as transhumanism, a concept based on the idea that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase - and the desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. The transhumanisation of ableism,which is the set of beliefs, processes and practices that perceive the improvement of human body abilities beyond typical Homo sapiens boundaries as essential to our continued evolution and even survival is another consequence.

While many argue that ‘unfair’ financial and technical advantages have long been a reality of Olympic competition, it is nonetheless understandable to feel some nostalgia for the noble notion of purity in amateur sport. However, a scenario where we strictly mandate a ‘pure’ Olympics only for species-typical, able-bodied athletes, for example, calls to mind scenes from The Chrysalids or the X-Men series of comics. The current trajectory of medical and technical developments (on the way to Kurzweils ‘Singularity’?) will undoubtedly see drastic and numerous improvements in prosthetics, nutrition, doping and even cybernetics. How do we monitor, regulate and decide which of these advancements is acceptable? In the X-Men stories, many ’species-typical’ (normal) humans exhibit fear and distrust of Homo superior (often used in reference to mutants), who are regarded by a number of scientists as the next step in human evolution and are thus widely viewed as a threat to human civilizations.

While Oscar Pistorius’s prosthetics were orginally used to replace his missing lower legs, voluntary augmentations or alterations may reasonably proliferate if world-class performance (and its rewards) are on the table. It is both fascinating and, admittedly, frightening to extrapolate from the case of Oscar Pistorius and imagine an UltraFuture where Homo superior athletes compete at levels far beyond the capabilities of todays able-bodied sports stars. Indeed, it is both fascinating and frightening to imagine a future where transhumanists, cyborgs and other supra-human entities walk the streets and live and work together with us in notable numbers.

What percentage of people around the world today have had cosmetic surgery? Have had re-constructive or use prosthetic limbs? Take drugs or supplements that improve their physical, emotional or mental performance? Utilize machines, electronics or other devices that give them a decisive advantage in improving their physical health or financial wealth?

How advanced and widespread will these technologies be in 30 years?

Footnotes
i. World Transhumanist Association, “The Transhumanist FAQ “ A General Introduction“ Version 2.1″, (2003) available at: http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/faq21/46/
ii. Ibid
iii. See: G Wolbring, “Glossary for the 21st Century”, International Center for Bioethics, Culture and Disability (2007) available at: http://www.bioethicsanddisability.org/glossary.htm; G Wolbring, “Why NBIC? Why human performace enchancment?”, (2008) 21 (1) Innovation; The European Journal of Social Science Research 25-40; “NBICS, other convergences, ableism and the culture of peace”, G Wolbring, Innovationwatch.com, 15 Apr 2007, available at: http://www.innovationwatch.com/choiceisyours/choiceisyours-2007-04-15.htm; G Wolbring, “New and Emerging Sciences and Technologies, Ableism, Transhumanism and Religion, Faith, Theology and Churches” (2007) 7 Madang; International Journal of Contextual Theology in East Asia, 79.

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