NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – DNAStar said today that it has been selected by the University of Michigan to be the sole authorized commercial provider of the institution's I-TASSER protein structure prediction software.
The I-TASSER software — a multi-year winner of the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction challenge — was developed in the laboratory of Yang Zhang, a professor in the University of Michigan's department of computational medicine and bioinformatics. Since 2012, DNAStar has had broad rights to distribute the software commercially and has done so under the brand name NovaFold. Since 2013, it has marketed the solution as part of Protean 3D, its suite of protein sequence, structure, and analysis tools.
"We are honored by the confidence shown by the University of Michigan in entering into this arrangement," Tom Schwei, vice president and general manager of DNASTAR, said in a statement. He added that NovaFold's development will be supported in the next two years by two National Institutes of Health grants.
"We have been working with the DNASTAR team for the past three years [and] appreciate and respect the way in which I-TASSER has been incorporated into an easy-to-use interface in Protean 3D," Zhang added. "We plan to work closely with DNASTAR to continue to enhance I-TASSER and NovaFold in the future."
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.