Startup Biotech Company Receives Michigan Emerging Technology Award
PLYMOUTH -- Advaita Corp., a startup company based on a Wayne State University technology developed by Sorin Draghici, said Friday it had received the final installment of a $125,000 award from the Michigan Emerging Technologies Fund program.
This comes on the heels of a $2.2 million Phase II federal Small Business Technology Transfer grant, "Pathway-Guide: A Novel Tool For The Analysis Of Signaling And Metabolic Pathways," awarded to Advaita in 2011 by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
Advaita has developed a bioinformatics software system called Pathway-Guide that provides the most advanced gene pathway analysis technology to date, based on intellectual property developed at Wayne State University. Pathway-Guide delivers meaningful results to researchers trying to understand the data generated by high-throughput experiments, including next-generation sequencing.
This technology takes into consideration a number of crucial biological factors such as the magnitude of the expression change for each gene, the type and the position of the genes in the given pathway, etc. By considering these important biological aspects, Advaita's Pathway-Guide is the first tool in a new generation of pathway analysis technologies able to eliminate many false positives, as well as correctly identify biologically meaningful pathways in a given disease.
Additionally, Advaita provides the only analysis technique that is able to identify gene signaling cascades that are presumed causal (putative mechanistic) explanations for all observed gene expression changes. Because of this unique capability, Advaita's approach can be used to help researchers identify optimal points of therapeutic intervention that can be considered new drug targets
"With these matching funds, Advaita will have the ability to pursue marketing and developing its customer base," Daghici said. "We firmly believe our solution to gene pathway analysis is the most advanced and comprehensive solution available today. As the world of bioinformatics and personalized medicine continues to grow, we believe our solutions will play an ever increasing role."
More Information about Advaita can be found at www.AdvaitaBio.com.
