Reaction Biology Corp. Awarded NIH SBIR Grant for Kinase Radioisotope Microarray Screening Development

Reaction Biology Corporation (“RBC”) announced that it has been awarded an SBIR grant from the National Cancer Institute to create a new kinase profiling and high throughput screening method using radioisotopes and microarrays. The $940,000 grant will be used to migrate the current well-plate radioisotope methods onto RBC’s DiscoveryDot™ nanoliter screening platform.

Protein kinase dysfunction is a key factor in cancer, inflammation and diabetes. Screening and profiling kinase inhibitors has been a major research and development effort in the pharmaceutical industry. While screening kinase activity with radioisotope detection is considered by many in the drug-discovery industry to be the “gold standard” of kinase assays, use of the format is limited by expense and the difficulty of radioactive disposal. The DiscoveryDot™ platform uses only a fraction of the reagents compared to well plate methods. “Due to our nano-scale format, the amount of radioisotope used in the process should be minimal,” said RBC Chief Technology Officer Haiching Ma, Ph.D. “This should lead to far fewer disposal and handling problems, and reduced cost overall.”