Intellimedix Launches a New Procuct for Genomic Sequencing
Besides teaching and conducting research, some Biology faculty are entrepreneurs. They take discoveries made in labs and commercialize them to produce products of social value. Professor Jeff Skolnick is an example of this entrepreneurial spirit. He works with a company called Intellimedix which has developed proprietary computer programs for analyzing nucleotide sequences. The new interpretative software is called PROGNOSTIX, and was developed by Dr. Skolnick and his research group at Georgia Tech. It is the first algorithm capable of not only covering whole exomes, but also using 3D protein structure to make more precise predictions about a DNA mutation’s possible pathogenicity, or the likelihood of the ability of a mutation to be associated with a disease. Compared to the industry standard 30% exome coverage rate, this novel algorithm offers greater than 80% coverage with a 3x lower rate of false positives.
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