NEW YORK — Enable Biosciences said on Tuesday that it has been awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) to continue work on a dried blood spot-based immunoassay for type 1 diabetes.
The grant will support the development of an automated high-throughput method to extract and test dried blood samples collected by patients at home. The company said in the grant's abstract that it has already demonstrated that its manual dried blood spot test can perform similarly to a serum-based assay.
"The NIDDK's support for this project will lower the barrier to universal [type 1 diabetes] screening," Enable Biosciences COO Peter Robinson said in a statement.
In early 2018, Enable's collaborators at Stanford University received a $700,00 award from non-profit type 1 diabetes research organization JDRF to validate and expand the capability of the South San Francisco-based company's saliva-based antibody detection by agglutination-PCR assay platform for diagnosing the disease.