Diffinity Genomics said this week that the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources has awarded it a one-year, Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer grant worth $717,229 to commercialize a DNA-purification product for PCR applications.
The product, called the Diffinity RapidTip for PCR Purification, is a single-use pipette tip that contains proprietary technology to purify DNA from PCR reactions in one minute, the company said.
The product will be available for sale in "early 2010," according to the firm.
The company said in a statement that the product "will be the only PCR purification product that can remove impurities, such as nucleotides, primers, and primer-dimers, without the need for additional reagents, consumables, or capital equipment."
The company was previously awarded a $105,504 Phase I STTR grant in 2008 to develop a working prototype of the product. The Phase II work "will focus on further refinements to the technology, manufacturing process scale-up, sales readiness, and leveraging the technology into other nucleic acid isolation and analysis applications," Diffinity said.
Diffinity Genomics collaborated with researchers at the University of Rochester for the Phase I project and will continue to do so over the next phase of the effort.
Lewis Rothberg, the principal investigator on the grant, is a professor of chemistry at the University of Rochester and chief technology officer of Diffinity, which has licensed the technology from the school.