Press Release

NIH Awards Fast-track SBIR Grant to Panomics, Inc.

Redwood City, Calif. August 2003—Panomics, Inc. has been awarded a fast-track SBIR grant (Small Business Innovation Research) by the NIH (National Institutes of Health). The grant will be devoted to establishing an interaction network of transcription factors in order to better understand the mechanism of transcription regulation, uncover the abnormal regulatory processes in human diseases, and develop new therapeutic approaches. Current technologies such as co-immunoprecipitation, supershift, or the yeast two-hybrid system simply cannot meet the requirements for this task due to time-consuming and labor-intensive operations and problems of reliability.

In Phase I of the grant, the team of scientists has established prototype arrays for protein-protein interactions and for transcription factor interaction in regulatory complexes. In Phase II, the team will extend the array format to include the entire set of 400 transcription factors, and will use the resulting data to develop a description of the interaction network.

The overall scope of this project is to establish a new tool for understanding gene regulation during normal development and disease, and to offer to researchers a set of reagents and database products, which are far more powerful that those currently available.