Circulomics Awarded $1.5M Phase II SBIR to Develop Multiplex microRNA Assay

BALTIMORE, MD--(Marketwired - May 13, 2015) - Circulomics Inc has been awarded a $1.5M Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to develop its Ligo-miR microRNA assay platform. This award follows a previous $400k Phase I award and will create a comprehensive portfolio of Ligo-miR products designed to address broad swaths of the microRNA market.

microRNA is one of the fastest growing areas in biomedical research. Ligo-miR offers customers an unrivaled combination of sensitivity, sample throughput, and low cost by using a novel multiplex technology to perform targeted profiling of 10-100 microRNA in a single reaction. Once putative microRNA panels have been identified, Ligo-miR can validate these panels by analyzing hundreds of samples per day, while offering significant savings in both reagent costs and hands-on time when compared to standard PCR and array approaches.

According to CEO Dr. Kelvin Liu, "One of the strengths of Ligo-miR technology is the ability to tailor sensitivity, multiplex capability, and sample throughput through minor tweaks to the assay design and detection method."

This flexibility will lead to a large portfolio of tools for diverse applications in research and clinical diagnostics incorporating a wide variety of samples including cultured cells, tissues, and biofluids. The first product will be Ligo-miR EZ, an assay kit for cell and tissue profiling. Using only a thermal cycler and fluorescent PAGE detection, Ligo-miR EZ can perform 24-plex detection on 96 samples per day at 20 copies per cell sensitivity. The next product, Ligo-miR CE, will perform high sensitivity profiling of biofluids and single cells using automated capillary electrophoresis to achieve 80-plex detection, sensitivity <100 total copies, and a thousand samples per day throughput. Future products will leverage microfluidic and single molecule technologies for further sensitivity and throughput gains. Users will also be able to integrate Circulomics' Nanobind technology to extract high quality DNA/RNA from their samples.

Ligo-miR assay kits will be available in semi-custom and fully custom panel formats. An Early Access Program is currently underway.

About Circulomics

To date, Circulomics has received nearly $2.8M in grants to develop an integrated portfolio of micro-, nano-, and single molecule technologies to streamline the entire biomarker analysis workflow, from front-end sample preparation to assays and detection instruments.