Sep 25 2007
BioNanomatrix, Inc., has announced that the company and Princeton University are recipients of a new Small Technology Transfer Research (STTR) grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). The two-year, $200,000 grant is focused on development of integrated fluidics systems for the front end sample sorting component of the BioNanomatrix whole genome analytic platform. The goal of the project is to develop integrated systems that can separate out and sort whole chromosomes from a single cell or multiple cells. This type of cell fractionation is a key early step in the analytic process.
"This new NCI grant will enable us to continue to collaborate with Princeton researchers to develop enhanced front-end capabilities for our analytic platform," said Han Cao, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of BioNanomatrix.
BioNanomatrix is developing pioneering integrated systems that enable nanoscale single molecule identification and analysis of the entire genome, delivering single molecule sensitivity in a highly parallel format. The company's patented analytic platform based on this technology provides rapid, comprehensive and cost effective ultra-high resolution analyses of DNA.
"The core BioNanomatrix nanofluidics technology was originally developed at Princeton and we look forward to continuing to collaborate to further develop its utility for applications in both biomedical research and clinical medicine," said Professor James Sturm, co-investigator of the project and William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM) at Princeton University.
The ability of this technology to deliver single molecule sensitivity in a highly standardized parallel format with minimal processing is expected to significantly reduce the cost and time needed for the extensive data and integrative analyses that have hindered widespread use of whole genome studies to date. This project will enable sorting of sub-cellular components by size, such as chromosomes prior to their isolation in nanofluidic channels, so that a number of analyses, including sequencing, mapping and epigenetics can be performed in a real-time, dynamic, bench-top format.