NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Quadrant Biosciences said today that it has been awarded a $330,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to further refine and validate its epigenetic diagnostic test for autism spectrum disorder.
This grant, administered by the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health, supplements a previously awarded $2 million Phase II grant that expanded a Quadrant study to five different academic medical centers in the US with the goal of recruiting 1,000 children.
Quadrant's Phase I and Phase II studies focused on non-coding and microbial transcripts found in saliva, while the new supplemental grant will be used to study protein-coding regions of the genome via whole-exome sequencing to help identify more precise biomarkers for ASD.
"We are very excited about the opportunity to explore the relationships between the protein-coding regions of the genome and the epigenetic biomarkers we've been studying for the past several years," Rich Uhlig, founder and CEO of Syracuse, NY-based Quadrant Biosciences, said in a statement.