DNA Software Receives Michigan Life Sciences Corridor Award
to Develop Software for DNA Assay design
Ann Arbor, MI – September 8, 2002 — DNA
Software finalized the terms of its Michigan Life Sciences Corridor
(MLSC) award from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.
The $932,000 investment will be used to develop software to
design DNA assays.
DNA Software will use the award to apply the
company’s existing software platform, the Oligonucleotide Modeling
Platform (OMP), to the field of assay design. The new software
builds on OMP’s precise modeling engine and will be used by
scientists to design assay. These types of studies have many
applications including drug target identification, cancer diagnosis,
determining drug mechanisms and side effects, and personalized
medicine. The company expects to release the software commercially
next summer.
This is the first outside investment in the
company. “We founded the company hoping to solve real medical
problems that affect real people,” says Mark A. Kielb,
company co-founder and president. “Having grown exclusively
through customer revenues has kept us tightly focused on customer
needs. With the MLSC award we can reach new customers in an
area which will significantly improve, and sometimes save, people’s
lives.” DNA Software was founded in December 2000 by Mr.
Kielb and John SantaLucia Jr., Ph.D., an associate professor
at Wayne State University.
According to Don Hicks, DNA Software COO and
principal investigator of the project, “We are very pleased
to receive this investment from the state. DNA Software was
started to bring together an integrated approach from the leading
science out of John SantaLucia's lab from Wayne State University
with some of the newest developments in software technology.This
investment from the state will enable the development of the
premier platform in this area for the simulation analysis and
design of the nucleic acid based assays. DNA/RNA hybridization
is the backbone of most of the commonly used assay designs out
there, including PCR, nucleic acid based probes, and microarrays.
The improved ability to predict nucleic acid hybridization should
reduce the time to market for designers of existing assay platforms
as well as improving the capabilities to test out and deploy
new platforms that are necessary to exploit the advantages of
a growing and changing market in the genomic area, and to support
advancements in personalized medicine.”
DNA Software’s winning proposal included
collaborations with researchers at the Applied Genomics Technology
Center (AGTC) at Wayne State University in Detroit, and the
Michigan Center for Biological Information (MCBI) at the University
of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The software will fill a critical
gap, according to Dr. Mark Hughes, Director of the AGTC and
the Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics at Wayne State,
“We have the instrumentation and skill set to perform array
work, but we lack the complex software tools needed to design
and test in silico, before the bench work, the thousands of
oligonucleotides [small pieces of DNA] that will be printed
on the microarrays.”
As part of the collaboration with the AGTC,
the software will be leveraged by two exciting on-going clinical
studies. In the first, DNA Software will work with Dr. Andrew
Sloan, at the Karmanos Cancer Institute, to design assays to
aid in distinguishing patients who are receptive to certain
cancer therapies from those who aren’t. Dr. Sloan is convinced
that “if we can develop such an assay, it will quickly be adopted
by the neuro-oncology community as the standard of care for
the treatment of these devastating neoplasms.”
In the second project, DNA Software will work
with Dr. Roy Baynes, Director of Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Transplantation
at the Karmanos Cancer Institute, to develop microarrays that
help screen for potential transplant matches using high-resolution
HLA typing. “If this strategy proves to be accurate, truly high
throughput, and rapid, it promises to shorten the time to donor
identification and will both improve outcomes and translate
into lives saved,” according to Dr. Baynes.
About DNA Software, Inc.
DNA Software, Inc. combines science and software
to enable industrial genomics through advances in technologies
based on nucleic acids. The company’s first software platform,
OMP (Oligonucleotide Modeling Platform,) models in silico
the folding and hybridization of single-stranded nucleic
acids with great accuracy. The company combines OMP with scientific
consulting, custom software development, and custom laboratory
research to deliver state-of-the-art support for designing and
developing of nucleic acid based technologies. For more information
on DNA Software, Inc., visit our website at http://www.dnasoftware.com.
CONTACT:
DNA Software, Inc.
204 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Office: +1 (734) 222-9080
Toll-Free: +1 (877) 362-7638
Fax: +1 (734) 222-9087
Email: info@dna-software.com
|
