3rd Millennium Receives SBIR Contract from Department of Defense to Develop Innovative Microarray Bioinformatics System
14-Feb-2002
CAMBRIDGE, MA - February 13, 2002 -- 3rd Millennium, a leading bioinformatics consulting firm, announced today
that is has received a Phase I Small Business and Innovation and Research (SBIR) contract from the Department of Defense (DOD) to develop an innovative
bioinformatics system for the management and analysis of microarray data.
This work is supported by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command
under Contract No DAMD17-02-C-0040. This proprietary bioinformatics system
will advance the DOD's Defense Technology Area Plan in infectious diseases
of Military Importance by integrating physical lab information with computational
information. In developing this bioinformatics platform, 3rd Millennium will
utilize certain technologies developed through a $1.8 million Advanced Technology
Program (ATP) grant awarded in October 2000 by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Through this SBIR contract, 3rd Millennium will further extend capabilities
it has developed in order to significantly advance the management and analysis
of microarray data.
Current microarray informatics systems have two fundamental limitations: (1)
the biological context of the samples is not recorded, which hinders scientific
and statistically relevant queries of the data and (2) computational processes
are not tracked, which hampers data analysis. 3rd Millennium's bioinformatics system will address both of these drawbacks by coupling a highly sophisticated
Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to an Analysis Information
Management System (AIMS™) for tracking computational processes-specifically
the internal and external analytical information that scientists generate
around their physical experiments. The proprietary informatics system will capture not only the physical laboratory processes tied to specific experiments,
but also the biological context of the samples used in those processes. This
will enable simultaneous querying across both biological context and gene
expression criteria.
"As modern biologists we are drowning in a sea of high throughput data.
We need systems to enable correlation between disease markers and gene expression
as well as systems to record the analytical methods we used to derive those
correlations. The bioinformatics system we are developing does both,"
said Jack Pollard Jr., Ph.D., 3rd Millennium's Principal Investigator on this project.
Richard Dweck, Founder and CEO of 3rd Millennium added, "3rd Millennium's
agreement with the DOD further validates one of the most critical issues in
informatics: the integration of physical laboratory information with the downstream
analysis. We believe integrating this information in a flexible bioinformatics
system will allow our clients to achieve greater efficiency within their labs, increase the value they derive from their research initiatives and eventually
decrease the time to biological discovery."
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