National Cancer Institute Awards Phase I SBIR to Natural Selection, Inc.

La Jolla, CA -- Natural Selection, Inc. has been awarded a 6-month Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Cancer Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health. This Phase I research will develop software that can classify cancer cell type reliably and accurately from gene expression profiles.

One challenge of cancer treatment is to target specific therapies to pathogenetically distinct tumor types in an effort to maximize efficacy and minimize toxicity. Improvement of cancer classification methods is therefore central to future advancement of cancer treatment. Cancer classification has been based primarily on morphological characteristics, but these methods have many significant limitations. Cancer classification based on molecular means (gene expression profiling, cytogenetics, etc.) has been advanced recently as an alternative to morphology. Gene expression profiling makes use of microarray techniques to monitor the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously from a given cell type (i.e., tumor or normal cell). Differential expression between these cell types can lead to markers that can be used for classification. Automated computational tools for this process are currently required by the health community.

Dr. Gary Fogel, vice president of Natural Selection, Inc. will serve as the Principal Investigator for this work, which will focus on the use of evolved neural networks for cancer class prediction and discovery from microarray expression data. According to Dr. Fogel, "this effort is aimed at producing evolved cancer class prediction and discovery algorithms with probabilities of correct assignment higher than those in the current literature." To obtain additional information on this project, contact Dr. Fogel at: gfogel [at] natural-selection.com.

Natural Selection, Inc.^® was founded in 1993 to address complex problems in industry, medicine, and defense. The company possesses unique expertise in computational intelligence techniques, including evolutionary computation, neural networks, and fuzzy logic. The corporation's research efforts support the discovery of new pharmaceuticals, the automated detection and diagnosis of breast cancer from film-screen mammograms, optical character recognition, and a variety of military and industrial projects.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. David B. Fogel
Chief Executive Officer
Natural Selection, Inc.
3333 N. Torrey Pines Ct.
Suite 200
La Jolla, CA, 92037
tel: (858) 455-6449
fax: (858) 455-1560
dfogel [at] natural-selection.com