NEW YORK — BioSpyder Technologies said on Wednesday that it has been awarded a contract worth up to $25 million to provide high-throughput toxicology screening services to the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Center for Computational Toxicology and Exposure (CCTE).
The CCTE is tasked with helping the EPA evaluate the potential human health and environmental risks associated with chemical exposures, including risks to freshwater ecosystems. Included in that work is the Toxicity Forecaster, a multi-year effort launched in 2007 that uses automated chemical screening technologies to expose living cells or isolated proteins to chemicals, which are then screened for toxicity-related biological changes.
Under the five-year contract, BioSpyder will use its TempO-Seq targeted RNA sequencing technology to assay cell lysates from the CCTE to measure transcriptomic changes for up to 21,000 protein-coding genes. Results including gene counts, quality control metrics, and sequencing files are then transferred to the EPA for further analysis, the Carlsbad, California-based company said.
Additional terms were not disclosed.
BioSpyder said this is the third contract it has received from the EPA for high-throughput toxicology research since 2015, following two others worth a combined $15 million.