NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Bioinformatics firm Advaita said this week that it has been awarded up to $2.0 million by the National Institutes of Health to develop software for analyzing next-generation sequencing data for personalized medicine applications.
Advaita was awarded a Fast Track Small Business Investigation Research Phase I and II grant by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to develop advanced software that leverages the Plymouth, Michigan-based firm's pathway analysis software called Pathway-Guide.
The company has received $150,000 for the first phase of the work and will receive $1.85 million in April 2014 for the second phase if it fulfills certain technical milestones, Andrew Olson, VP of business development for Advaita, told GenomeWeb Daily News. The development work is anticipated to last three-and-a-half years.
The new software will allow for the quantitative analysis of gene expression data at the single sample level, Advaita said. Other capabilities being built in include the characterization of patient subgroups and disease subtypes through the development of a pathway profile.
The company had previously received a $2.2 million Small Business Technology Transfer Phase II grant to develop the software. That grant expires in May 2014, though Olson said that Advaita expects it will receive a no-cost extension to continue work being performed as part of the grant.
"With this additional funding, we will develop new tools that allow users to identify biological pathways that are impacted in individual patients/samples, discover and characterize disease subtypes and patients subgroups, identify pathway signatures for drugs and conditions, and identify new targets for existing drugs" for drug repurposing and repositioning uses, Olson said in a statement.