Sorin Draghici, Ph.D.

DETROIT - Advaita Corporation, a spinout company from Wayne State University, was selected to participate in the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Commercialization Assistance Program (CAP). CAP is a specialized technical-assistance program that helps promising life-science companies accomplish their commercialization goals and transition their SBIR/STTR into the marketplace.

The 18-month program provides individual mentoring and consulting sessions, training workshops, and access to domain experts that enhance the commercialization profile and readiness of participating companies.

Advaita Corporation was founded in 2005 by Sorin Draghici, Ph.D., professor of computer science in Wayne State's College of Engineering, and is headquartered near Ann Arbor, Mich. With the assistance of a $2.2 million NIH STTR Phase II award, Advaita developed a bioinformatics software solution called Pathway-Guide. Based on intellectual property developed at Wayne State University, the application provides the most advanced gene pathway analysis technology to date.

Pathway-Guide delivers meaningful results to researchers trying to understand data generated by high-throughput experiments, including next-generation sequencing. Pathway Guide takes into consideration a number of crucial biological factors, such as the magnitude of the expression change for each gene, the type and position of genes in a given pathway, and more. By considering these important biological aspects, Advaita's Pathway-Guide is the first tool in a new generation of pathway analysis technologies able to eliminate many false positives, as well as correctly identify biologically meaningful pathways in a given disease.

Andrew Olson

"We are now entering the commercialization phase of our development plan," said Andrew Olson, Advaita's vice president for business development. "Selection for the NIH Commercialization Assistance Program not only lends credibility to the products we are developing, but also provides additional resources for us to reach our goals. This will be an exciting time as we continue to grow our business."

More information about Advaita can be found at www.AdvaitaBio.com.

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Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit http://www.research.wayne.edu.