News

NIH SBIR Awarded to LIMR/LCGC and Dynamis Therapeutics Inc.

Dynamis Therapeutics, Inc., a personally held company specializing in consumer, OTC and pharmaceutical products that encourage healthy aging, announced today that it has raised $500,000 from an angel investor and received an NIH SBIR grant to discover inhibitors of a putative pathway contributing to diabetic complications which may also contribute to accelerated aging diseases. The focus will be on screening the LIMR library of chemical compounds for inhibitors of the enzyme fructosamine-3-kinase which may play a direct role in the formation of factors contributing to cellular aging and diabetic complications. The sponsoring organization for the grant is The National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and the investigation will be conducted in collaboration with the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR) in Wynnewood, PA.

“The award of this grant recognizes the key role of Aging Factor in the development of complications associated with diabetes,” said Annette Tobia, PhD, President and CEO, Dynamis Therapeutics. “It provides support for the development of therapeutics that may interfere with the onset of pathologies associated with elevated levels of glucose such as nephropathy, retinopathy and neuropathy. The enzyme was discovered at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, PA. “We are delighted to have received this SBIR Phase I award with Dynamis to discover new drug leads to treat diabetes complications”, said Melvin Reichman, Ph.D., President and CSO of LCGC Inc., Senior Investigator at LIMR and co-PI on the SBIR.

See: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/07/prweb4301054.htm

Small Business Innovation Research Award Will Test and Develop New Product for Drug Discovery

The LIMR Chemical Genomics Center (LCGC) in collaboration with Istech, a company in York, PA, received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Grant from the National Institutes of Health totaling $190,277. LCGC is a biotech company that was created to fill a major gap in technology by providing access to large compound libraries that can be used to evaluate new drug targets using high-throughput screening. This is achieved using a state-of-the-art NanoTube Automated Retrieval System (NARS), which was built by Istech and for which LIMR recently received exclusive worldwide license. This SBIR award will allow Dr. Melvin Reichman, President of LCGC, and Marlin Yohn, President of Istech, to validate various compound management products in an effort to resolve bottlenecks that currently face scientists in the area of research materials management and drug discovery. The research and development team also consists of X-Act Technologies Inc. of Erie, PA, and REM System Inc. of Paoli, PA. They will use the NARS technologies they developed to find new ways to reduce the costs, increase the quality and productivity of drug discovery research, and allow for more reliable identification of new drugs. This will ultimately lead to improving health and could lead to additional unique applications in the field of forensics and genetic screening.

See: http://www.mainlinehealth.org/doc/Page.asp?PageID=DOC002128