NEW YORK – Bioinformatic analysis firm Constantiam Biosciences said Wednesday that it has received a roughly $485,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute on Aging to advance a tool for interpreting risk variants associated with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD).
With the one-year grant, Constantiam will develop its MAVEvidence platform, which curates and analyzes genetic variant data from functional studies, for use in AD/ADRD risk assessment, according to the Houston-based company.
Specifically, Constantiam plans to refine the platform for gathering and validating data from published multiplexed assays of variant effect (MAVE) studies for at least two major genes implicated in AD/ADRD.
The funding will also be used to enable MAVEvidence to calibrate and translate such data into functional evidence that can be used within existing American College of Medical Genetics variant interpretation frameworks, as well as to generate quantitative measures to assess a personalized disease risk.
Earlier this year, Constantiam was awarded a Phase II SBIR grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute to further develop a platform called Varify for reclassifying variants of uncertain significance at scale using MAVEs.