Zen-Bio, a Research Triangle Park firm that has received $235,000 in loans from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center since forming in 1995, has received another in a series of grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Less than a month ago the privately held biotechnology and contract research firm announced receipt of a $200,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Cancer Institute to develop a way to differentiate between breast cancer cell types, improving the way they're isolated and cultured. Now the firm has landed a $1.38 million Phase II SBIR grant to help it commercialize its unique tool for type 2 diabetes and obesity research.
"We are excited to move forward into the commercial development phase for this program," said Ben Buehrer, Ph.D., Vice President of Zen-Bio. "Investigating the interactions between different cell types involved in obesity-related diseases is extremely difficult. We hope to reduce some of the difficulty by providing a customizable co-culture system for researchers to use. This grant will allow us to optimize and validate the cell system in much greater detail. That frees up time and money for researchers to focus on using the system to discover novel treatments and therapeutics for type 2 diabetes and metabolic disease."