NEW YORK – Circulomics said this week that it has won a total of $2 million from two separate National Institutes of Health grants this year to support the development of DNA sample preparation products for long-read sequencing.
A $1.6 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute will allow the company to improve its Short Read Eliminator kits, which deplete short DNA fragments from high molecular weight DNA. These improvements will drive new applications and control sequencing read length distribution.
In addition, Circulomics received a $400,000 supplemental award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to apply its library prep methods to high-throughput ultra-long nanopore sequencing. This supplement adds to a $1.5 million Phase II SBIR grant the company won from NIGMS last year to develop new library preparation kits that use its Nanobind magnetic disk technology.
Circulomics said the new products developed under these grants expand its offering from high-molecular weight DNA extraction kits to library preparation kits. The company expects to launch the first product resulting from this work, called Nanobind Ultra Long Library Prep Kit, later this year for ultra-long nanopore sequencing on Oxford Nanopore's sequencing platforms.
In 2017, Circulomics won another $1.5 million Phase II SBIR NIH grant and in 2015, it nabbed a $1.5 million Phase II SBIR grant from NIGMS.