Menon Qualifies for XPRIZE Alumni Network With Molecular Mirror Platform Technology

Molecular Mirror™ Detection Technology Allows for Screening of More Than 100,000 Patient Specimens Per Day Using Standard MRI Systems Available in Hospitals

San Diego, CA - (NewMediaWire) - March 31, 2021 - Menon Biosensors, Inc. ("Menon" or the "Company"), a subsidiary of Menon International, Inc., a distributive technology portfolio company with assets in ag-tech and diagnostics, announced today that it has qualified for the XPRIZE Alumni Network.

This comes as a result of Menon’s development of an advanced system and method for detecting the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus. The system, known as Molecular Mirror™, is a detection technique that produces 100% accurate results within 30 minutes of bacterial and viral pathogens. 

The Alumni Network membership is a prestigious service that identifies Molecular Mirror™ method to be amongst the top-performing assays for detecting COVID. Through this vehicle, the team will stay in touch with supporting organizations that have participated in XPRIZE competitions as they scale their solutions after the competition is over. Benefits include access to valuable resources such as investors, potential partners and customers, business mentors, marketing and exposure, and more.

In addition to the Alumni Network, Molecular Mirror™ team’s contact information was shared with the $50 million COVID Apollo Project led by experienced life sciences investors and company builders that will work with OpenCovidScreen, the XPRIZE community, and beyond to accelerate the best ideas, technologies, and innovations to market and scale them.

“We are pleased to be accepted into the XPRIZE Alumni Network and utilize their extensive resources to bring the Molecular Mirror™ to the masses,” said Dr. Suresh Menon, Founder and President of Menon. “The technology is highly effective and extremely versatile. By leveraging existing hospital MRI equipment, Menon’s COVID-19 screening technology is capable with sample testing rates of greater than 100,000 samples per hour, per site.”

The Molecular Mirror™ assay has achieved 100% detection with no false positives in multiple double-blind tests validated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and various universities and other private clients. Menon’s rapid, ultra-low Level of Detection (LOD of 3-5 viral copies), sensitive, and specific assay for detection of the COVID-19 virus is based on binding nucleic acids to proprietary magnetic nanoparticles without the need for nucleic acid extraction. Large-scale detection has been demonstrated using existing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems that are common in standard metropolitan hospitals at a cost competitive to assays currently in the market. This test can be performed with any MRI machine in the world.

The Molecular Mirror™ assay achieves high sensitivity and specificity by use of magnetic nanoparticles functionalized with target-specific biomarkers that bind to specific regions of a pathogen’s genome. The sample, with bound nanoparticles, is then processed to produce a change in its magnetic properties, specifically the “spin-spin relaxation time,” thus producing a signal in the presence of the target of interest, in this case detecting the COVID-19 virus.

For more information about Menon, please visit MenonBiosensors.com/.

About Menon Biosensors, Inc.

Menon Biosensors is a molecular biochemistry company that provides DNA analysis for the diagnosis of biological pathogens.  Menon Biosensors’ Molecular Mirror™ NMR-based platform technology (classified by the U.S. Government until 2012) provides superior sensitivity and specificity and minimizes sample preparation, providing best in class sample-to-answer pathogen detection. The technology has been validated by respected Universities and diagnostic companies.

About XPRIZE

XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement of over 1M people and rising, delivering truly radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. XPRIZE inspires and empowers a global community of problem-solvers to positively impact our world by crowdsourcing solutions through large-scale competitions, tackling the world’s grandest challenges in exploration, environment and human equity. Active competitions include the $100 Million XPRIZE Carbon Removal with Elon Musk, $20 Million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, $15 Million XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion, $10 Million XPRIZE Rainforest, $10 Million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, $5 Million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling and $1 Million Digital Learning Challenge. Donate, sign up or join a team at xprize.org.

Press Contact:

Kyle Porter

CMW Media, President

Menon@cmwmedia.com

+1 858.264.6600

Corporate Contact:

Menon Biosensors, Inc.

info@menon.us

+1 858.675.9990