A Medical Device Daily

NextBio (Cupertino, California) a provider of a platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data, reported the receipt of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant will provide nearly $1 million over two years to support the incorporation of genomic and proteomic information from additional vertebrate organisms into NextBio. It will also help fund NextBio's development of infrastructure to support plant research by incorporating Arabidopsis, corn, rice and soy plant genomics into its cross-species knowledge discovery framework.

As part of this effort, NextBio will develop ontologies, translational methodology and cross-study comparison logic to connect findings across different organisms. Additionally, the company will develop advanced statistical and visualization methods to help correlate and interpret the data. The new species information will build upon a wealth of information already supported within NextBio from human, mouse, rat, fly, worm and yeast systems.