Press Release

3rd Millennium Receives Phase II SBIR Contract to Continue Development of Microarray Repository and Data Analysis System (ARDAS™) for the U.S. Department of Defense

WALTHAM, MA - January 1, 2005 -- 3rd Millennium, a leading bioinformatics consulting firm, announced today that is has received a $730,000 Phase II SBIR contract from the Department of Defense (DOD). The contract is to continue the development of its next generation microarray information system to support infectious disease research within the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command. 3rd Millennium's receipt of this SBIR grant follows the successful completion of its Phase I work for the U.S. Army.

In Phase II of this project, 3rd Millennium will extend its current microarray informatics platform to support advanced analyses, enhanced data visualization, and analytical workflows for Affymetrix data. It will also provide flexible means to link to external data sources and to integrate with external 3rd party tools that help in data annotation and analysis and in the reconstruction of gene regulatory networks.

"We are gratified to further our initial Phase I work with a comprehensive Phase II effort" said Roland Carel, Ph.D., 3rd Millennium's Head of Informatics and Principal Investigator for the SBIR grant. "By integrating external resources and tools to the extensive functionality of the LIMS, repository and analysis pipelines we built in a prior SBIR grant, we will provide researchers with a complete informatics package for tracking the acquisition of their microarray data, organizing the data in a secure and scalable repository, and analyzing and extracting biological meaning from the data."

"This is the second SBIR grant that 3rd Millennium receives from the department of defense and it demonstrates our ability and strength as scientists and software engineers to work on large projects that bring value to the Army and to the life science community as a whole," said Ousama Shamma, president of 3rd Millennium. "This system will be the first not only to track and integrate critical experimental and analytical information but also to link to external data sources and leverage several 3rd party analytical tools. It will provide researchers the flexibility they need to study their experiments and results in a much broader context than is currently available on the market."

Additional Information on 3rd Millennium
3rd Millennium, Inc, located in Waltham, MA is a life science informatics consultancy that works with biopharmaceutical, government, and academic clients on a project basis to plan, develop, and integrate software systems critical to their research and discovery programs. 3rd Millennium has leveraged its scientific, information technology, and project management expertise to implement systems for laboratory information management, microarray-based gene expression profiling, gene analysis and annotation, genomic and proteomic data integration, biological pathway modeling and knowledge management. Additional information can be found at http://www.3rdmill.com.

The views, opinions and/or findings contained in this report are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy or decision unless so designated by other documentation.