National Institutes of Health(NIH),under the SHIFT initiative,has granted two Small Business Innovative Research(SBIR)Phase I awards,totaling$800k over 2 years,to Circulomics.
Circulomics will use the grants to develop its Ligo-miR microRNA assay technology,which uses PCR-free,ligation-based multiplexing to acquire the expression profile of 10-100 microRNA in a single streamlined assay.
Studies conducted on Ligo-miR has demonstrated>100-fold higher sensitivity,>10-fold lower cost per sample,and>10-fold higher sample throughput than microarray based approaches.
The company will also use the grant to develop its PicoSep single molecule analysis instrument which uses micro-/nanofluidics and single molecule technology to perform molecular analysis with as little as 5 picoliters of sample and less than 100 DNA molecules.
In addition,the company has received$75k from Maryland TEDCO to develop its first commercial product based on Ligo-miR technology called Ligo-miR EZ.
