Reaction Biology Corporation (“RBC”) today announced that it has been awarded an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to accelerate development of its new DiscoveryDot™ High Throughput Screening technology for drug discovery. The NIH grant is part of the Screening Roadmap, designed to produce innovative chemical tools for use in biological research and drug development. Out of 8 recipients of grants pursuant to the original RFA, Reaction Biology is the only private corporation to be so awarded.
The grant provides for $1,828,000 in funding over four years. It originates from the National Human Genome Research Institute and funds two specific areas: 1) The further development of RBC's proprietary spray deposition technology for High Throughput Screening (“HTS”) reaction activation, and 2) The development of enhanced microarray printing technology for use in RBC's DiscoveryDot™ HTS system and elsewhere. The DiscoveryDot™ technology currently is capable of screening up to 6,600 individual reactions at 1 nanolter volume on a 1-by-3 inch glass slide. Millions of dollars can be saved on large scale screening campaigns through reagent savings, process costs, and labor reduction. RBC intends to further increase the throughput of its HTS process through the development of enhanced microarray printing and automated spray deposition.
Reaction Biology, based in Malvern, Pa., provides high throughput screening services to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. The company uses a patent-pending combination of technologies to perform screening at the
nanoliter scale, while preserving quality, speed and simplicity.
Combining genomics microarray printing technology and picoliter aerosol deposition, RBC has commercialized a novel technology that drives HTS to new levels of simplicity and efficiency.