Triangle Biotechnology Awarded Grant by NIH to Develop Sonication Reagent Technology for Overcoming Bottlenecks in Chromatin Fragmentation for Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP)
Chapel Hill, North Carolina (April 9, 2019) – Triangle Biotechnology, Inc., a pioneer in developing novel life science sample prep solutions, announced today that it has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This grant will support the company’s development of a sonication-based reagent technology to enable high-throughput, uniform, and cost-effective shearing of chromatin for chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) and ChIP-Seq applications. Triangle Biotechnology will work on this project in collaboration with Samantha Pattenden, PhD, and Paul Dayton, PhD, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“We are thrilled to have received this support from the NIH,” said David Allison, Senior Scientist at Triangle Biotechnology. “The technology developed through this grant aims to accelerate critical epigenetics research that will continue to improve characterization, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer and other diseases.”
The ability for cells to alter gene expression in response to environmental cues ensures proper control over key biological processes for an organism. These environmental cues travel along signaling pathways that direct regulatory machinery to target DNA sequences. Notably, DNA is packaged with protein to form a cellular structure known as chromatin, and this structure modulates access of the regulatory machinery to key regions across the genome. Emerging evidence indicates that anomalies in chromatin architecture lead to aberrant gene expression, which can drive the progression of many human diseases. Current research aims to characterize how improperly organized chromatin contributes to disease by analyzing the distribution of critical proteins and protein modifications across this structure. The extraction and fragmentation of chromatin is a required step for this characterization, but current mechanisms for this process are hampered by inconsistent efficiencies, sample degradation, and low throughput workflows.
“The efficient extraction of chromatin from biological samples is a significant bottleneck for the ChIP assay,” said Samantha Pattenden, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of Applied Epigenetic Screening Technologies at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at UNC. “With exponential growth of NGS technologies and an increasing interest in utilizing assays such as ChIP for biological discovery, there is a considerable need for better, faster, and more cost-effective chromatin fragmentation methods.” Dr. Pattenden is a co-founder and Scientific Advisor at Triangle Biotechnology.
Research reported in this press release was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43CA236177. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
About Triangle Biotechnology:
Triangle Biotechnology, Inc. is dedicated to accelerating life science research and improving human health by delivering novel, effective, and efficient life science sample prep solutions. Applications include NGS, ChIP, ChIP-seq, mass spectometry and more from many different sample types. For more information, contact us at info@trianglebio.com.