IATIA will use Bio-Rad partnership to focus on AP

A recent deal with Bio-Rad Asia-Pacific has seen Melbourne bio-optical equipment makers IATIA expand sales into an impressive 17 countries throughout the region.

The deal, expected to reap more than $AUD1 million revenue for IATIA, is to license QPm phase imaging software into every confocal microscope sold by Bio-Rad AP over the next three years.

Confocal microscopy produces completely in-focus 3D detail of biological specimens. Its digital phase imaging capability is achieved without the use of additional optical hardware, and allows users access to previously inaccessible information from samples, and offers results difficult to achieve using conventional confocal microscopy.

Bio-Rad AP is a subsidiary of Bio-Rad Laboratories, a listed US company with annual sales of $US900 million into the life science research market.

"Bio-Rad's association with IATIA will allow us to take Australian technology into the Asian multi-million dollar microscopy market. The QPm product will enhance the functionality of both the company's Radiance2100 confocal product and its new compact CellMap product," said Bio-Rad's Chris Johnson, AP microscopy business manager.

IATIA described the deal as "significant" for the company, and managing director Brian Powell said the deal was a satisfying confirmation of the company's direction in the life sciences market.

"We launched the company on the basis of our phase imaging technology's potential in the life sciences sector. It's exciting to think what's ahead for us... with the commercialisation of some of the other applications we have discovered in the past year or so," he said.

Powell said some of the most promising applications for the company's IP were outside the life sciences. They included surveillance and detection for defence and security, improved imaging through smoke and haze, and defect monitoring across a range of manufacturing industries.

Pentax deal bearing fruit for Optiscan

In another confocal equipment breakthrough, Melbourne medical instruments company Optiscan exhibited what it claimed as the first confocal endomicroscope at the Digestive Diseases Congress in Orlando, Florida. The Pentax-partnered device allows non-invasive examination of tissue inside the body, providing 3D, real-time images of living cells. Previously, only low-magnification images from inside the body have been possible.