BioForce Nanosciences Inc announced that a $500,000 Phase I NIH/SBIR grant from the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases has been awarded to the Company. The award, entitled “Protein Nanoarray for Cytokine Profiling in Mouse Models”, aims to build an antibody nanoarray for the creation of diagnostic tests requiring extremely small sample volumes, approaching that of a single cell.

The BioForce Nanosciences nanoarray platform will provide robust protein profiling data for cytokine biomarkers targeting kidney and digestive systems, including diabetes, progressive renal failure and inflammatory bowel disease. The Company is developing profiling protein chips tailored to these, and other, disease targets and signaling pathways requiring extremely small sample volumes. Current BioForce nanoarrays allow one thousand or more molecular tests to be carried out in the same surface space occupied by a single standard microarray spot. Principal investigator Eric Henderson, Ph.D., states that, “This assay system is particularly well-suited for studies involving small animal model systems, where conventional techniques, like ELISA or microarrays, may require lethal amounts of starting sample material.”

The proprietary platform provides all the benefits of miniaturization, but still allows readout using standard fluorescence methods permitting data collection from a single image. This attribute increases the availability of array-based bioanalyses with limited budgets and/or instrumentation resources, and opens the doorway for clinical testing not currently possible with existing methodology.