NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Cellzome will use a €3.85 million ($5 million) grant it has won from the German government as part of a high-tech funding program to expand its KinoBeads technology application.
The company plans to use the funds specifically to develop the KinoBeads platform for use in epigenetic target classes and to optimize it for diagnostic and translational medicine studies that would allow doctors to monitor target-drug interactions directly in patient material.
Cellzome is working on expanding its proteomics platform so that it may be applied more broadly in drug discovery and development programs for inflammatory diseases and translational medicine.
The five-year grant was awarded by Germany’s HighTech initiative, which is funding technology companies in five regions. Cellzome, which has its German base in Heidelberg, is located in the Rhine-Neckar Region, which received a total of €40 million in grants for biotechnology research in its BioRN cluster. Participants in the BioRN cluster include pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, Serono, and Roche, research institutions, and other biotechnology firms. The company noted that the other four regions landed grants for technologies outside of the life sciences.
In September, Cellzome formed a strategic research alliance with GlaxoSmithKline to discover, develop, and market novel kinase-targeted therapeutics for inflammatory disease. It also is working with Johnson & Johnson to discover novel Alzheimer’s disease treatments.