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Biotech / Medical : AXYS Pharmaceuticals Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Larry Liebman who wrote (328)	10/18/1999 5:29:00 PM
From: Tiger	Respond to of 455

Some news on AXPH's spinoff: Akkadix Awarded $800,000 Biotechnology Research Grant To Advance Study of Protein Function SAN DIEGO, Oct. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Akkadix Corporation announced today that it has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to develop high throughput computational approaches to improve the accuracy of automated methods that predict protein functions. The two-year grant of more than $800,000 was awarded by the National Institute for General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Leo Kim, Chief Technical Officer at Akkadix, said that the grant will support a research and software development program under the direction of principal investigator Arcady Mushegian, Ph.D. It will be based on annotation strategies aimed at improving the accuracy of methods used to analyze information on protein function. ''Several large scale sequencing projects have produced an explosion of data, but previous automated methods of processing and organizing information contained in these databases have not achieved the level of accuracy required to reliably predict protein function,'' Kim said. ''A Phase I study employing the methods Dr. Mushegian's team is pursuing has resulted in an error rate of less than 5%, as compared to error rates as high as 25% with some other methods. Kim said that Akkadix is conducting beta tests of high throughput software developed around refined annotation strategies employed in the Phase I study. ''Understanding and being able to accurately predict the function of proteins is at the heart of applications of biotechnology in developing new drugs, industrial enzymes and genetically enhanced plants,'' Kim said. ''This grant recognizes the promise our research holds for advancing this critical area of science.'' Akkadix applies advanced life science technologies to discover and characterize novel genes that can be incorporated into plants to make them resistant to disease and pests, increase plant vigor and productivity and enhance the quantity and quality of agricultural outputs such as oil, starch, fiber and nutrient. The company also maintains cooperative germplasm relationships with more than 25 companies around the world. SOURCE: Akkadix Corporation