Grant supports personalized medicine tools

Systems biology company GeneGo has been awarded a small business research grant by the National Institutes of Health to develop a database and systems biology tool-set to study mutations and sequence heterogeneity in human genes.

The grant was provided via the NIH innovations in biomedical computational science and technology initiative. The effort will also encompass the biological consequences of sequence variations on disease susceptibility and drug response, according to an announcement.

The work will aid personalized medicine by helping researchers use personal genetic profiling to identify therapeutic strategies that are optimized for an individual, says principal investigator Richard Brennan, director of toxicology at GeneGo, in the announcement. Researchers will be able to use the tools expected to be generated by the project to link sequence variations to the specific mechanisms and biological pathways driving idiosyncratic outcomes.

- here's the release (pdf)