NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Era7 Bioinformatics, a provider of sequencing and analysis services for bacterial genomes and metagenomics, has received about $430,000 in funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness' Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology.
The grant is part of a larger, roughly $1 million award given to the Cardiobiome consortium, a group of four companies that are working on a platform for studying patients' microbiomes. They're initially focusing on data from patients with acute myocardial infarction as a proof-of-concept and analyzing data from more than 4,000 samples.
For its part, Era7 will work on developing cloud-based software for analyzing 16S data generated as part of the project, and integrating the software with hospitals' electronic health records.
"The general interest in getting genomics data integrated with health care pipelines and EHR should be complemented with the integration of 16S metagenomics results since these results will be very important as useful biomarkers for prevention, diagnosis and follow-up of many diseases," Era7 CEO Eduardo Pareja said in a statement. "In Era7, we are convinced that precision medicine will incorporate in the EHR, 16S data from different microbiomes: oral, gut, blood, skin, bronchial or from disease-specific regions as tumors or abscesses."
This is the second grant that Era7 has received in recent months to support its metagenomics services efforts. In November, the company got a $100,000 grant from Spain's Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to fund the design and testing of new 16S amplicon and sequencing approaches.
For a more in-depth look at Era7's work under the new grant, click here.