Parabon NanoLabs, a leading designer and manufacturer of breakthrough products at the nanoscale, announced today its award of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant.
The grant will be used to demonstrate the viability of a new class of anticancer molecules that are engineered to automatically self-assemble from interlocking strands of synthetic DNA. It was a combination of innovations - DNA nanotechnology fabrication and grid computing sequence optimization - that led to Parabon NanoLabs' award.
Unlike other therapeutics, Parabon's compounds are deliberately engineered to solve specific therapeutic goals using an approach that effectively replaces the current paradigm of "drug discovery" with that of "drug design." By affixing molecular subcomponents (e.g., antibodies, pharmaceuticals and enzymes) to strands of DNA that are pre-sequenced to attach to one another to form composite constructs, Parabon NanoLabs researchers produce therapeutics that are able to precisely target and destroy individual cancer cells, without damaging surrounding healthy tissue. The highly competitive SBIR award from NSF will fund pre-clinical experiments, designed in collaboration with researchers at a leading pharmaceutical company, to validate the approach and demonstrate the efficacy of these novel compounds. 