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Genialis Expands Partnership With Slovenia's BioLab

NEW YORK – Genialis said Thursday that it has received a grant from the Slovenian Research Agency to develop technologies for biomarker discovery in collaboration with BioLab, the bioinformatics laboratory at the University of Ljubljana.

The project is worth €400,000 ($464,000) over three years, according to a Genialis spokesperson, and may explore new bioinformatics techniques like machine learning for deriving predictive gene signature and harmonizing clinical datasets in search of "clinically applicable" biomarkers.

The grant expands on a sponsored research agreement that Boston-based Genialis entered into with BioLab earlier this year to create new algorithms and computing methods for choosing therapeutic options for patients based on their disease subtype.

"The precision medicine movement has made great strides, but it also has revealed certain limitations in targeting treatments to patients due to the challenges of identifying therapeutically relevant biomarkers," Genialis CEO Rafael Rosengarten said in a statement. "Genialis is focused on the next generation of biomarkers, those that embrace biological complexity, confront bias in data, and take full advantage of the computational technologies at our fingertips."

Genialis said that it will detail its technology platform at the BioData World Congress in Basel, Switzerland, next month.

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