Therapy Areas: Infectious Diseases
Sapient Receives USD 9.2m Grant for Population-Scale Discovery Mass Spectrometry Analysis
11 July 2022 - - US-based biomarker discovery organization Sapient has been awarded a new grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to use its rapid liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (rLC-MS) based platforms for population-scale discovery metabolomics analysis in broad support of the foundation's programs across maternal, newborn, and child health, nutrition, and vaccine development, among other priority research areas., the group said.

A large portion of the USD 9.2m grant will provide bioanalytical capacity for studies aimed at identifying metabolic pathways and biomarkers to inform novel nutritional, disease-prevention, and disease-treatment interventions for health issues that disproportionately affect women and infants in developing countries.

Sapient's untargeted, high throughput discovery metabolomics platform will be applied to analyze tens of thousands of biosamples collected through programs conducted by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grantees in its Global Health Discovery Collaboratory.

In addition to rLC-MS analysis, the new grant will enable Sapient to provide grantees with support for biocomputational analyses and molecule identification of key discovered biomarkers, as well as capacity building for analytical and data handling capabilities among the grantees.

The new grant represents an extension of prior funding awarded to Sapient from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which was used to provide population-scale metabolomics discovery analyses for 27 independent global health discovery and translation projects initiated by the foundation's grantees in the areas of COVID-19, maternal, newborn, and child health, infectious disease, and hypoxia.

Sapient's support in these programs led to key discoveries including identification of novel biomarkers of early-stage disease, biological processes, and protective factors that are being used to develop diagnostic field tests and optimal disease prevention and treatment interventions.

Sapient is an end-to-end biomarker discovery organization dedicated to accelerating the mapping of circulating chemistries in humans through rapid, large-scale small molecule biomarker profiling.

Its platform combines advanced mass spectrometry technologies able to assay >11,000 small molecule factors per biosample biocomputational learning, and a proprietary Human Biology Database with data from several hundred thousand biosamples to discover circulating biomarkers of health, disease, and drug responsiveness at unprecedented speed and scale.
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