GeneGo Wins National Cancer Institute Grant

St. Joseph-based systems biology software developer GeneGo Inc. Tuesday announced that it had been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant for further development of an analytical platform for translational research and data analysis in oncology.

The amount of the grant wasn't immediately announced, but Phase II SBIR grants are usually between $750,000 and $1 million.

NCI funding will support the industry and academia collaborative project MetaMiner (Oncology) run by GeneGo with investigators at Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Tgen, Van Andel Institute and several global pharmaceutical companies.

The MetaMiner platform combines disease reconstruction of multiple cancers, a genomics and proteomics data repository and advanced statistical tools based on pathway descriptors.

Said Yuri Nikolsky, CEO of GeneGo and the grant's principal investigator: "Over the last two years, we have created a general framework for disease reconstruction, causal disease models, and annotated many thousands of 'causative' links between genes, perturbed pathways and seven different cancers. We see target discovery, translational cancer research and personalized diagnostics as the top application areas for MetaMiner (Oncology)."

Added Kornelia Polyak, associate professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a consultant on the grant: "There are many 'generic' pathway tools on the market, helpful to some extent in cancer data analysis. However, none of them is centered around cancer biology, which is essential."

GeneGo develops systems biology technology such as compound based pathway analysis, cheminformatics & bioinformatics software for life science research. The original computational MetaDiscovery platform allows an integration and expert analysis of different kinds of experimental data and relevant bioactive chemistry within the framework of curated biological pathways and networks. GeneGo's flagship product, MetaCore 6.2, assists pharmaceutical scientists in the areas of target selection and validation, data mining in biology, identification of biomarkers for disease states and toxicology. The second product, MetaDrug 6.2, is designed for prediction of human metabolism, toxicity and biological effects for novel small molecules compounds.

More at www.genego.com.