Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio and Transformatix Technologies, Inc., in Davis, California, partnered to create BioLinQ, a new spinoff biomedical informatics company. The company is designed to supply advanced software solutions for disease diagnosis and medical research.
“Years of development at Nationwide Children’s Hospital funded in part by NIH have laid the foundation for very mature high-end solutions in digital pathology, biospecimen analysis, and biorepository management,” reports Ken Murray Founder and CEO of Transformatix Technologies Inc.
“With the growth of molecular technology and the advent of personalized medicine, BioLinQ is poised to have a significant impact upon the diagnostic and research capabilities in hospitals, academic research centers, and the pharmaceutical industry.”
In another productive partnership, Wake Forest University and NanoMedica, their biotechnology company partner, received $860,000 in grants. Researchers received $700,000 in funding from NIH through the NIH SBIR program plus the university received a two year $160,000 Collaborative Funding Grant from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.
Wake Forest will share the funds with NanoMedica, a Winston-Salem company that licensed the patent for “Next-Gen Lab-on Bead. The goal is to refine the technology called Next-Gen Lab-on-Bead for commercial use to bring to market a new drug-discovery tool using next generation genetic sequencing. Next-Gen Lab-on-Bead will be the first bead-based drug discovery tool to use the latest genetic sequencing technologies that will make drug and diagnostics discovery significantly more efficient.
Pharmaceutical companies will use the technology as a sort of Google search tool to use for the development of new drugs. This will be done by sending the scientists a protein marker of the disease when they want to find a treatment, and then letting “Next-Gen Lab-on-Bead test millions of possibilities all at once. Although the Wake Forest–NanoMedica research team is focused on drug discovery. Next-Gen-Lab-on-Bead also could be used to accomplish more accurate speedy medical diagnoses.
According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, next-generation genetic sequencing is expected to boom in the next five years as researchers explore drug discovery and diagnostic applications. According to the report next-generation genetic sequencing is going to be one of the fastest growing markets in the biomedical industry.
