Micro Identification Technologies Inc. has made headlines as creator of the world’s only non-biological automated system for identifying bacteria, the MIT 1000. Few people, however, are aware of just how the company was formed. MIT has, in fact, a long history leading up to its groundbreaking invention.
Micro Identification Technologies has its roots in a company called Electropure Inc., a producer of advanced water purification systems. Electropure was founded in 1972, and eventually went public in 1987. In 1998 the company formed a division called Laserpure, which would ultimately became Micro Imaging Technology (MIT). In 2000, Electropure created two wholly owned subsidiaries, Electropure EDI and MIT. The first subsidiary, EDI, manufactured ultrapure water systems, while MIT focused on developing a pathogen identification system.
In 2005, Electropure’s management decided to concentrate on the promising pathogen ID technology, and sold the EDI subsidiary to a California based company called Snowpure. At that time, a new board of directors was formed and the company name was officially changed to Micro-Imaging Technology. In addition, a Science Advisory Board was formed that included:
• Ralph Emerson, a noted microbiologist who has held academic and research positions at UC Irvine Medical and UC Davis
• Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prize Winning Chemist, who invented PCR
• Edward Ackerman, a senior scientist at Pacific Northwest Labs
In 2010, the company name was finally changed to Micro Identification Technologies, to better reflect the applications of its technologies.
Today, the MIT 1000 is seen as a revolution in bacterial identification, replacing complex and expensive biological processing with a fully automated process based upon unique microbial patterns generated by reflected laser light. The patterns are quickly and automatically analyzed by advanced software to produce a highly accurate reading in just minutes, from a very small bacterial sample.
For more information, visit www.micro-identification.com.
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