NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Advaita Bioinformatics has received a notice of award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for a Phase II Small Business Investigational Research grant to develop and implement a new method of identifying disease subtypes and subgroups of patients within disease phenotypes.
The Plymouth, Mich.-based firm will use the three-year, $1.8 million grant also to identify biological pathway signatures for specific diseases and to identify pathway signatures for drugs in order to repurpose them, it said.
The grant follows a Phase I award issued last September for up to $2.0 million. Advaita also received a $2.2 million Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer grant from NIGMS in 2011 to develop advanced pathway analysis research methodologies.
The firm said that whole-genome sequencing is becoming a standard of care in some difficult-to-treat diseases, and the technology it is developing will allow researchers and doctors to better understand the mechanisms of particular diseases and which drugs may be the most appropriate for treatment.
Advaita develops methods for analyzing gene expression data in the context of signaling and metabolic pathways.