This Year's Highlights

• Sword recently received a Homeland Security Grant through DCEO to continue to develop our food safety products for the detection of pathogens.
• Sword's team of world-class scientists recently completed benchmark testing against colorimetry and found Sword's technology to be 2000x more sensitive.
• Sword is finalizing a supply agreement with a key antibody provider which enables us to reduce our costs and cash burn significantly. The cost reduction in upfront costs is ten fold.

Anticipated Highlights

• Sword is in evaluations with 3 major food safety clients, 2 of the world's largest food producers & the world's largest outsourced testing laboratory. Sword looks forward to concluding these evaluations & bringing these prospects on as clients.
• Sword's scientific team will continue to benchmark our products against other technologies. We look forward to establishing we have the diagnostics technology with the best sensitivity and detectability. Our next benchmark will be against flouresence.
• Sword is in the early stages of exploring the use of our proprietary detection technology in arenas beyond food safety. Progress to date is notable. Near term projects include ELISA, further integration with Raman Spectroscopy, and drug discovery.

Corporate Mission

Sword Diagnostics, an Illinois-based life sciences company, has developed a patent-pending diagnostics technology for the industrial and clinical markets. This technology detects pathogens (disease-causing agents), proteins and other targets. It has been designed by world-class scientists to have broad applications including food safety, drug discovery, disease detection, and consumer product safety. Initially, the system is being applied to improve food safety for large food producers such as Kraft, Nestle and Perdue. Sword provides food producers with a system that reduces the risk of contaminated food reaching the market. Incidents such as the recent recall of 2,800,000 pounds of Oscar Mayer and Louis Rich chicken products may be avoided with the use of the Saber Detection System.

The Saber Detection System improves food safety by identifying pathogens 3x faster than existing systems. The importance of this improvement in time to results cannot be underestimated and is by far the most important factor in reducing the risk of contaminated food entering the market. In a survey completed by Strategic Consulting, 85% of food processors cited time to results as their number 1 or 2 concern.

Sword?s patent-pending technology improves time to results by utilizing a unique automated system combining Raman spectroscopy with proprietary chemistry to increase detection capabilities 2000 fold. In food safety applications, the Saber Detection System identifies harmful pathogens in one-third the time of existing systems. For example, Listeria results are now available in hours, not days. The key to Sword?s speed is the unique automated system and chemistry demonstrated here. In addition to improving the time to results, Sword?s technology allows for the detection of substances in smaller quantities than current systems and minimizes the impact of interfering substances.