NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – GeneGo today said that the National Cancer Institute has awarded the firm a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant to fund further development of an analytical platform for translational research and data analysis in oncology.
Specifically, the NCI funding will support the MetaMiner (Oncology) project being run by GeneGo in collaboration with researchers from Harvard medical School, Johns Hopkins University, the Translational Genomics Research Institute, the Van Andel Research Institute, and several global pharmaceutical firms. GeneGo's MetaMiner platform combines disease reconstruction of multiple cancers, an 'omics data repository, and statistical tools based on pathway descriptors, said GeneGo.
The St. Joseph, Mich.-based firm did not disclose the amount of the grant, but under the NCI's Phase II SBIR program, companies may apply for a grant of up to $750,000 to fund two years of R&D.
"Over the last two years, we have created a general framework for disease reconstruction (causal disease models) and annotated many thousands of 'causative' links between genes, perturbed pathways, and seven different cancers," GeneGo CEO Yuri Nikolsky said in a statement. "We see target discovery, translational cancer research, and personalized diagnostics as the top application areas for MetaMiner (Oncology)."