The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued US Patent #8,148,139 to Applied BioCode, Inc, a privately held biotechnology company, for its"Light Transmitted Assay Beads," describing the method of use and manufacturing of its Barcoded Magnetic Beads (BMB) products.

“These patents are important components of our intellectual property portfolio, specifically covering our encoded polymer bead technology licensed initially from Maxwell Sensors, Inc. These patents will provide our products with long-term market value.”

“The patent further expands the scope of our earlier patents, #7,858,307 (Dec 28, 2010) and #7,871,770 (Jan 18, 2011), for the development of polymer-based Barcoded Magnetic Beads, which offer excellent biocompatibility and long-term stability properties,” said Winston Ho, PhD, President of Applied BioCode. “These patents are important components of our intellectual property portfolio, specifically covering our encoded polymer bead technology licensed initially from Maxwell Sensors, Inc. These patents will provide our products with long-term market value.”

Because Barcoded Magnetic Beads exhibit very high contrast barcode patterns, the barcodes can be decoded easily and very accurately. The multiplexing is readily increased by adding additional barcode digits to the BMB’s. The 12-digit micro bead has 4,096 separate barcodes, enabling the simultaneous analysis of up to 4,096 DNA or protein targets in a small amount of sample. The BMB and associated BioCode analyzers provide clinical and life science research laboratories with a wide variety of biological applications including molecular diagnostics, immunoassays, gene mutation analysis, biomarker validation & discovery, drug resistance genotyping, and pharmacogenomics.