Nanogen has been awarded a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the US Army to continue developing NanoChip applications for detecting biological warfare agents and infectious disease agents.
This award, a ëDual Use Science and Technology grant, is the second that the San Diego microarray company has received from the Army. In October 2000, Nanogen received the first grant for biowarfare detection. The research will be supervised by the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick, Md. NanoChip electronic microarrays use a matrix of 100 positively charged pads to immobilize strands of negatively charged DNA, enabling researchers to individually control hybridization sites. In this project, the company is combining this technology with automated biological sample preparation and amplification steps. The finished product would be able to detect a biowarfare or infectious agent from a whole blood sample. The company plans to use the technologies it develops under this grant to its development projects for molecular diagnostics. This award comes just a week after Nanogen announced it had sold 10 new NanoChip workstations during the third quarter. -MMJ