01 Aug Nanogen wins $2.5 million research grant
San Diego – A company that uses Medical College of Wisconsin technologies and clinical and microbiological expertise has been awarded $2.5 million for development of diagnostics for sepsis and pneumonia.
The company, Nanogen, Inc., said the research grant, which will come over the next five years, would enable it to develop improved molecular biological methods, miniaturize those methods, and demonstrate the performance of this new molecular diagnostic approach to diagnose sepsis and community-acquired pneumonia in a hospital laboratory setting.
The grant is from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Nanogen will be using its proprietary chemistry and multiplex detection technologies along with the Medical College of Wisconsin knowledge. The goal of the partnership is to develop an automated diagnostic system that would be able to rapidly detect a number of bacteria and viruses that cause sepsis and pneumonia in patients, the company reported.
“In previous government grant programs, Nanogen greatly reduced the size of its instrument and integrated essential biological sample preparation, amplification and detection technologies to design a sample-to-answer diagnostic system,” said Howard C. Birndorf, Nanogen’s chairman of the board and CEO. “This NIAID/NIH research program will further the design of a sophisticated prototype assay and instrument system and sepsis and pneumonia detection panels to help physicians expedite test results in the hospital lab and make better treatment decisions.”