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Newomics Snags $908,000 in SBIR Grants

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Newomics said today that it has received from the National Institutes of Health two Small Business Innovation Research Phase I grants totaling $908,000.

The first grant, which began on May 1, consists of $683,000 over two years to support development of the company's picoelectrospray ionization technology for top-down proteomics applications. The second, which is slated to begin on June 1, provides $225,000 over six months to support development of a platform for high-throughput identification of the molecular targets of natural products.

In a statement, Newomics said that it plans to use the funding to hire two PhD-level scientists "to complement its technical team." Currently, the company consists solely of founders Daojing Wang and Pan Mao.

"Our application-specific platforms and solutions will meet diverse challenges in precision medicine and contribute to the core missions of the NIH, in particular, personalized healthcare," Wang said in a statement.

Newomics was launched in 2011 as a spinout from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to commercialize the multinozzle mass spec emitter array technology developed there by Wang and Mao.

As opposed to conventional mass spec electrospray sources, which use single-nozzle emitters to transfer sample into instruments for analysis, Newomics' MEA technology uses a series of multinozzle emitters arranged in a circular array on a silicon chip. The multiple emitters allow for higher-throughput experiments, as each emitter can be interfaced to a separate LC system allowing for rapid sequential or parallel mass spec analysis. The increase in nozzles also provides an improvement in sensitivity proportional to the square root of the number of nozzles per emitter.

The company aims to commercialize the MEA devices as well as proteomic diagnostics based on the technology.

In addition to the awards announced today, Newomics has been supported by three previous SBIR grants: a $250,000 award that ended Feb. 28; a $300,000 award that ends June 12; and a $225,000 award that ends Aug. 31.

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