18-Jun-1998

Cybergenetics Awarded SBIR Phase II Grant by NIH

/PRNewswire/–The National Institutes of Health has awarded Cybergenetics, Inc. a two year Phase II SBIR grant of $749,905 to further develop its fully automated TrueAllele(TM) Technology genetic analysis software. TrueAllele eliminates the data scoring bottleneck for microsatellite genetic data.

"Conventional manual data editing is the single greatest source of cost and error in the high-throughput genotyping process," says Dr. Mark Perlin, CEO of Cybergenetics. "Our TrueAllele Technology automates this data scoring, and greatly streamlines the gene discovery process."

TrueAllele performs automated lane tracking and automated allele calling on gel image data from Perkin Elmer/Applied Biosystems and Pharmacia/ALF automated fluorescent DNA sequencers, and runs on the Macintosh and UNIX computer platforms. Cybergenetics' SBIR grant will extend TrueAllele to DNA sequencers from other manufacturers, and to the PC computer.

"Our SBIR grant will help Cybergenetics rapidly move beyond the usual gene discovery applications into forensics, cancer genetics, differential display, and agricultural genetics," says Dr. Perlin. "We are including novel algorithms that will further advance TrueAllele's leadership position." These computer-based methods include determining allele frequencies from pooled DNA samples, and improving performance by learning from past experience.

The patented TrueAllele Technology is used at SmithKline Beecham (UK), deCODE genetics (Iceland), and various academic and government laboratories for high-throughput genotyping and gene discovery applications.

Cybergenetics is a bioinformation company based in Pittsburgh, PA that develops unique computational approaches for genetic research. Cybergenetics is committed to providing open software systems that accelerate and simplify genetic discovery.

For more information, contact Cybergenetics at info@cybergenetics-inc.com, or visit the http://www.cybergenetics-inc.com web site.

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