Virogenomics, Inc. Awarded $2 Million National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology Program Grant to Develop Integrated Diagnostic ...( PORTLAND Ore. Oct. 3 /- Virogenom...),Health

PORTLAND, Ore., Oct. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Virogenomics, Inc. today announced that the company has been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a Sensor System on Panel (SSOP) that tests for many different biological markers in a single assay.

Successful development of the SSOP could revolutionize research on and the diagnosis of multifactorial conditions such as autoimmune disease and allergy, enabling earlier treatment and the development of more specific therapeutics.

Medical diagnostic methods typically test for a single "biomarker" that indicates a possible disease state. This approach provides only limited information because many diseases have multiple contributing factors and surrogate markers of interest. For that reason a single test can never provide a complete diagnosis. Autoimmune diseases, allergies, cancers, and infectious diseases can have many different causes and manifestations, and could be better diagnosed with devices that can test for many different markers in a single assay. Virogenomics has proposed developing such a device using transducers made with existing microelectronic manufacturing methods and is based on technology licensed from Oregon Health & Science University.

The proposed Sensor System on Panel (SSOP) will include all the hardware and firmware required to do a complete analysis of the interaction of biological molecules and communicate the result. The SSOP will incorporate at least two types of transducers and several transducer sub-types as well as circuit elements for command and control functions. Each sensor will have many transducers, each with a specific protein attached. When a patient sample, either serum or saliva, is applied to the device, the SSOP will detect any proteins that bind to any of the proteins attached to the transducers. The device would be the size and shape of a typical USB flash drive, and could be read on a standard perso
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