DNASTAR Awarded Antibody Engineering SBIR Grant

DNASTAR® has announced that it has received a Phase I SBIR grant award from the National Institutes of Health entitled, “Structural bioinformatics software for epitope selection and antibody engineering”.

The funding will support the company’s research and development aimed at producing a superior antibody engineering capability on a desktop computer.

It is also a key step in the direction of producing a comprehensive desktop proteomics software suite, which is well underway at DNASTAR.

Tom Schwei, Vice President and General Manager of DNASTAR, commented, “When most life scientists think about DNASTAR today, they focus on the “DNA” aspect of our products and company name. This is very appropriate as we have established a strong reputation for producing high quality, easy to use desktop genomics software. However, there is much more to DNASTAR than simply genomics.

“For the past several years, we have been building a foundation for our emerging proteomics platform in Protean 3D within our Lasergene software suite. This grant project will help us move quickly to develop a key component of our vision for our proteomics suite - creating a tool to produce superior epitope prediction and antibody engineering results compared to today’s available methods and tools.

“Long-term, we plan to continue developing our desktop computer proteomics suite to include protein structure prediction, protein motion, molecular interactions, and much more. We believe there is a great need for easy to use yet powerful desktop software to support scientists in the proteomics realm, much as we’ve been doing for scientists involved in genomics research for more than 25 years.”