Fighting crime and disease, one lab sample at a time

Myron Sasser describes his Newark-based company as a simple toolmaker.

Except the tools developed by MIDI Inc. over the last 28 years have been used to stem the tide of hospital-based infections and tuberculosis, improve agricultural production around the world, identify anthrax in the U.S. Senate office buildings and track down biological weapons in Iraq.

"They didn't find any on that last one, but that's not our fault," the 80-year-old entrepreneur said with a wry smile. "The system works."

That "system" is a series of software packages, sold under the brand name Sherlock.

Used exclusively in combination with an instrument called a gas chromatograph manufactured by Agilent Technologies in Greenville, MIDI's software is able to quickly and reliably identify a variety of microbes and various chemicals, leading to a wide array of uses.

Later this year, the company will roll out two new software packages, one designed to analyze food products, such as the purity of olive oil, and the other to help law enforcement agencies solve arson cases.

"If there is a fire, the fire investigators will go out and collect samples of the burned materials that are taken to one of over a thousand labs in the world that do arson detection," Sasser explained. "Right now, it's done by an expert who looks at the data and says, 'This looks like diesel fuel,' or "This looks like lighter fluid.' That's too subjective … We want to give them definitive proof."

MIDI was built on the company's first success with a software system that employed an innovative identification method. That method took advantage of the fact each species of bacteria has a cell membrane that contains a unique pattern of fatty acids.

Sasser didn't discover the identification system, which already had been described in a handful of scientific papers.

But in the early 1980s, he became one of the first to find a commercial application for it by using gas chromatographs to analyze fatty acids from bacteria samples. Those samples could then be matched to a database of more than 2,000 signatures he first began developing while working as a plant pathologist at the University of Delaware.

At the time, Sasser was working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to find a bacteria that would help crops ward off fungal diseases.

"We found one and filed for a public service patent, but we had to show that the isolates we had really were this bacteria," he said. "I had about 200 isolates and had to do 32 bio-chemical tests on each one. I didn't want to do that many tests. So I found three or four papers that said potentially fatty-acid analysis could identify bacteria. Within the first week, I could see it was going to work and I just got so excited that everything else disappeared."

Sasser discovered Hewlett-Packard was working on a similar process and the two formed a partnership.

While today the university promotes research that leads to the creation of start-up businesses, Sasser said his colleagues then didn't understand his breakthrough and actively discouraged his efforts.

So he took an early retirement and continued the research on his own, even though it meant taking on significant personal debt.

"I sold everything I had, borrowed from everyone I knew and even mortgaged my house," he said. "My car was breaking down and I didn't have $300 to repair it, so I walked everywhere for a few months."

The HP Microbial Identification System was finally released in 1985, but soon after, Hewlett-Packard decided the system wasn't as profitable as it had hoped and cancelled future production.

Sasser said he was able to withstand those early setbacks, thanks in part to his prior business experience before becoming a professor.

"This is actually my fourth business in my lifetime," he said. He launched his first business at the age of 9, selling coconuts to German prisoners of war for 10 cents apiece. A later agricultural venture ended in failure, he said.

"I thought I was brilliant, but I wasn't nearly as smart as I thought I was," he said. "But that's also what research is all about. It's failure, failure, failure and then success. You stack up your successes and go from there. That's life."

Sasser eventually gained full rights to the technology and launched Microbial Identification Inc., or MIDI, in 1991.

In the late 1990s, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used the system for aerobic bacterial identification.

The company later launched a second system predominately used by respiratory hospitals and public health labs to identify strains of tuberculosis.

In 2000, MIDI worked with the U.S. Army to compile a database of potential biological warfare/bioterrorism bacteria, which it then gave away to all of its customers.

More recently, the company has incorporated newer technologies, including a DNA sequencing software package that also identifies bacteria, yeast and fungi.

"No one system is perfect and there are reasons for doing each of them," Sasser said. "The take home message is that you need more than one type of technology and we've adjusted with the times."

Over the years, the company's customers have included Chistiana Care and some of the nation's leading hospitals, numerous state health departments, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, a host of pharmaceutical companies and various governments and businesses in 45 counties around the world.

"The greatest growth for us is in the Asia Pacific region," said Craig Kunitsky, MIDI's chief marketing officer. "Probably half of our total systems worldwide are in China, with South Korea being second."

While MIDI's identification systems can be sold on their own, they typically retail for about $80,000 to $100,000 when purchased in combination with the Agilent hardware.

The privately held company does not disclose sales or revenue figures, but Sasser said he's never been as interested in the company's monetary gains as he is in what its products are able to accomplish.

"We're a small business and our primary interest isn't in making money. That's not what it's really all about," he said. "We're in the business of saving lives. That's what interests me."

Contact Scott Goss at 324-2281 or sgoss@delawareonline.com.