NextBio receives phase II SBIR grant to add new genomic and proteomic content

Apr 14 2009

NextBio has announced the receipt of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The grant will provide approximately $1,000,000 over two years to support the incorporation of genomic and proteomic information from additional vertebrate organisms into NextBio. It will also help fund NextBio's development of infrastructure to support plant research by incorporating Arabidopsis, corn, rice and soy plant genomics into its cross-species knowledge discovery framework.

"Life science researchers use critical biological information from studies of diverse species to make key correlations that help them discover new knowledge about human or plant physiology and disease," said Saeid Akhtari, NextBio President and Chief Executive Officer. "With this support from NIH, we will extend the NextBio offering enabling researchers to leverage a wider range of data from model organisms to better understand biology."

As part of this effort, NextBio will develop ontologies, translational methodology and cross-study comparison logic to connect findings across different organisms. Furthermore, the company will develop advanced statistical and visualization methods to help correlate and interpret the data. The new species information will build upon a wealth of information already supported within NextBio from human, mouse, rat, fly, worm and yeast systems.