DETROIT ? Wayne State spinout Advaita Corporation received the final $125,000 installment of a Michigan Emerging Technologies fund award, this on the heels of a $2.2 million Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer grant.
The company is based on technology developed by Sorin Draghici, Ph.D., professor of computer science in the WSU College of Engineering.
Advaita has developed a bioinformatics software solution called Pathway-Guide that provides the most advanced gene pathway analysis technology to date, based on intellectual property developed at Wayne State University.
Pathway-Guide delivers meaningful results to researchers trying to understand the data generated by high-throughput experiments, including next-generation sequencing. This technology takes into consideration a number of crucial biological factors, such as the magnitude of the expression change for each gene, the type and position of genes in the given pathway, and more.
By considering these important biological aspects, Advaita?s Pathway-Guide is the first tool in a new generation of pathway analysis technologies able to eliminate many false positives, as well as correctly identify biologically meaningful pathways in a given disease.
Additionally, Advaita provides the only analysis technique that is able to identify gene signaling cascades that are presumed causal (putative mechanistic) explanations for all observed gene expression changes. Because of this unique capability, Advaita?s approach can be used to help researchers identify optimal points of therapeutic intervention that can be considered new drug targets.
?With these funds, Advaita will have the ability to pursue marketing and develop its customer base,? said Draghici. ?We firmly believe our solution to gene pathway analysis is the most advanced and comprehensive solution available today. As the world of bioinformatics and personalized medicine continues to grow, we believe our solutions will play an ever increasing role.?
