Sorin Draghici, Ph.D.

DETROIT - Advaita Corporation, a startup company based on technology developed at Wayne State University by Sorin Draghici, Ph.D., professor of computer science in the College of Engineering, received the final installment of a $125,000 award from the Michigan Emerging Technologies Fund program. This comes on the heels of a $2.2 million Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant, "Pathway-Guide: A Novel Tool for the Analysis of Signaling and Metabolic Pathways," awarded to Advaita in 2011 by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.

Advaita Corporation has developed a bioinformatics software solution called Pathway-Guide that provides the most advanced gene pathway analysis technology to date, based on intellectual property developed at Wayne State University. Pathway-Guide delivers meaningful results to researchers trying to understand the data generated by high-throughput experiments, including next-generation sequencing. This technology 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 the 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.

Additionally, Advaita provides the only analysis technique that is able to identify gene signaling cascades that are presumed causal (putative mechanistic) explanations for all observed gene expression changes. Because of this unique capability, Advaita's approach can be used to help researchers identify optimal points of therapeutic intervention that can be considered new drug targets.

"With these funds, Advaita will have the ability to pursue marketing and develop its customer base," said Draghici. "We firmly believe our solution to gene pathway analysis is the most advanced and comprehensive solution available today. As the world of bioinformatics and personalized medicine continues to grow, we believe our solutions will play an ever increasing role."

The grant number for funding from the National Institute on General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health is GM087013.

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.