Applied Digital and Digital Angel Corporation have announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have cleared VeriChip™, the world's first implantable radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip for human medical uses in the United States. The FDA clearance follows the completion of a de novo application review.

Last year, the Attorney General of Mexico and some of his staff were "Chipped". More than 100 people in the office of the Attorney General of Mexico have been implanted with the VeriChip that allows them access to secure areas. Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha and his staff have received the implants for security reasons.

About the size of a grain of rice, VeriChip is a revolutionary use of a technology that is widely used in animals but not in humans. It is a subdermal, radio frequency identification microchip that can be used in a variety of security, financial, emergency identification, and other applications.

The chip lies dormant under the skin until read by an electromagnetic scanner. The external scanner passes a small amount of Radio Frequency Energy through the skin energizing the dormant VeriChip which then emits a radio frequency signal containing the verification number. The number is displayed by the scanner and transmitted to a secure data storage site via telephone or Internet. The chips can only be read by the company's proprietary scanners.

In Spain, The Baja Beach Club began offering VeriChips to regular patrons who wanted to dispense with traditional identification and credit cards. About 50 "V.I.P.'s" have received the chip so far, according to a spokesman, which allows them to link their identities to a payment system. The program has been expanded to a club in Rotterdam also owned by Baja, and about 35 people there have signed up for the implants, the company said.

Solusat, the Company's exclusive Mexican distributor, facilitated the "Chipping" of the Mexican officials.

The application with the most potential for use in humans is in the health care field. Once scanned, the RFID chip would be referenced back to a central medical database. The unique ID, called the "VeriChip Subscriber Number", is matched with the Global VeriChip Subscriber Registry. The password-protected data is maintained on two VeriChip database registry operations, one in Riverside, California the other in Owings, Maryland.

VeriChip announced last week that it had signed a distribution agreement with a British company, Surge IT Solutions, which it said intended to use the technology to control access to government facilities.

The National Institute for Infectious Diseases in Rome, Lazzaro Spallanzani, is leading a study using VeriChip (http://www.inmi.it/Eng_Home.html)

Applied Digital has been free to sell VeriChip in the United States for non-medical applications.

The technology was created by Digital Angel Corp. (DOC), which was acquired by Applied Digital Solutions in 1999. VeriChip Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Applied Digital. For more information, visit the company's website at http://www.adsx.com.

Anne Crawley, Editor
findBIOMETRICS.com
October 14, 2004