Grant will finance advancement of sample preparation methods, biological weapon detection, and microbial forensics.
Ibis Biosciences received four government contracts totaling up to $4.2 million. The funding will go toward the detection and identification of microbial threat agents for biodefense applications.
Three of these contracts worth approximately $3.3 million are from the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS-S&T). The last one, about $0.9 million, comes from the DoD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).
These contracts will fund Ibis’ planned development of advanced sample preparation methodologies and validation of applications on the Ibis T5000™ for broad biological weapon detection. It will also help advance the company’s microbial forensics applications and the microbial database.
As part of the contracts awarded by DHS-S&T, Ibis will continue to develop broad biological applications to identify and characterize important bacterial and viral agents that are considered crucial to maintain homeland security.
Under the DTRA agreement, Ibis will broaden its core technology in the area of biodefense through advances in sample preparation to allow detection of trace amounts of broad groups of microbial agents.
