NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Transgenomic said today that it has been awarded a two-year, $1.5 million Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund a collaborative project with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Under the grant, the partners will augment the multiplexing capabilities of ICE COLD-PCR technology, which was originally developed at Dana-Farber and is exclusively licensed to Omaha, Nebraska-based Transgenomic.
"While we currently offer multiplexing capability in our ICP-powered kits and services, this grant will enable Transgenomic and Dana-Farber to accelerate development of very highly multiplexed formats for applying ICP simultaneously to hundreds or thousands of targets," Transgenomic President and CEO Paul Kinnon said in a statement. "We expect this will pave the way for its wide adoption and use with cutting-edge high-throughput sequencing platforms and whole-genome panels."
The principal investigator on the project is Mike Makrigiorgos, professor of radiation oncology at Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School. Makrigiorgos noted in a statement that the new funding will enable the partners to develop multiplexed formats for ICP technologies that can filter out mutated DNA from a high excess of normal DNA circulating in cancer patients' blood.
He added that the enhanced technology will enable multiplexed mutation enrichment that combines well with sequencing and can potentially be used to identify drug-resistance mutations, indicate remaining tumor load, or provide doctors with an early indication of relapse.