Tag: genomics
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Canadian Govt Opens Call for Personalized Medicines R&D
The Canadian government opened a matching grant competition for research proposals on personalized medicine. The call seeks research proposals that can take treatments from “one size fits all” to more precise treatments and interventions addressing specific characteristics of the individual, made possible by new diagnostic technologies that look at patients’ unique genetic signatures. The competition…
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$600K Foundation Grant to Fund Cancer Genomics Research
The National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) has awarded a $600,000 grant to the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix and the University of Arizona in Tucson for the study of targeted cancer therapies. The three-year grant will enable TGen and the university to continue its NFCR Center for Targeted Cancer Therapies, created in…
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NSF Supporting Research to Reduce Fertilizer Use in Maize
Researchers at three universities, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and USDA’s Agricultural Research Service have received a $1.3 million grant from National Science Foundation for research on reducing the amount of fertilizer to grow maize. The three-year project is led by the ARS’s Ivan Baxter, who also serves on the Danforth Center’s faculty in…
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Process IDs Rice Traits to Help Tsunami-Hit Rice Growers
A collaboration between scientists in Japan and the U.K. is developing methods to identify genetic markers that can help cut the time needed to breed salt-tolerant and shorter rice to help Japanese growers recover from the tsunami in March 2011. The new process, called MutMap, is described online in the journal Nature Biotechnology (paid subscription…
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Compound That Repairs RNA Defects Identified
Researchers at Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida have identified a compound that can help repair defects in ribonucleic acid (RNA), a genetic material similar to DNA used in protein synthesis. The team’s findings appear online in the journal ACS Chemical Biology (paid subscription required). The researchers, led by Scripps chemistry professor Matthew Disney (pictured…
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Biofuels Developer Secures $17M Investment Round
SG Biofuels Inc., a bioenergy crop company in San Diego, has completed a $17 million financing round to expand its R&D and commercialization programs. The series B funding — the second round of financing after start-up — was lead by life sciences venture capital company Thomas, McNerney & Partners, with participation from Finistere Ventures and…
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Sanofi, VCs Back Start-Up Deriving Natural Product Drugs
The French drug maker Sanofi, with American venture capital (VC) companies Third Rock Ventures and Greylock Partners, are investing up to $125 million in Warp Drive Bio a new biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Warp Drive Bio, being incubated at Third Rock Ventures, specializes in using genomics to derive drug candidates from natural sources, such…
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Analytics Company, Johns Hopkins to Study Asthma Genomes
Knome Inc., a genomics analysis company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says it received a contract from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore to provide its software and services for a study of genetic variants that contribute to asthma in African American and African Caribbean populations. Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed. The…
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Student Project Develops Bacteria-Based Glucose Sensor
A team of Missouri University of Science and Technology students in Rolla developed a sensor based on genetically modified E. coli bacteria to detect glucose levels. The students, members of the university’s chapter of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) Foundation, developed the system as part of an annual competition sponsored by iGEM, receiving a…
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Software Speeds Database Sequence Searches
Computational biologists at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany have developed software that makes possible a new search method to identify proteins in databases with similar genomic sequences. The software that the developers say is faster and can discover twice as many evolutionarily related proteins as previous methods, is described online in the journal Nature…