BioMedomics, a privately held biotechnology company co-founded by Frank Wang, Ph.D., to develop advanced medical diagnostics tools for use in the fast-growing field of personalized medicine, has received a $750,000 Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the National Institutes of Health.
The Research Triangle Park-based company, which opened its doors in 2006 and last year received a $25,000 North Carolina Biotechnology Center loan, had received a $100,000 Phase I SBIR grant to help it demonstrate the scientific merit of its medical diagnostic technologies. BioMedomics' product line includes reagents, assay instruments and data analysis tools targeting point-of-care personalized testing for specific disease biomarkers.
The field of personalized medicine is growing rapidly and may transform the healthcare system by enabling testing for variations in genes, gene expression, proteins, metabolites and cellular functions. Rather than using the "common denominator" or "shotgun" approach of developing a chemical to treat everyone with a certain malady, scientists are increasingly targeting individual patients' profiles to detect problems -- and to fix them.