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Jay Inslee: Washington's 1st Congressional District

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Kirkland-based Userspace Receives $194,000 SBIR Grant for Proteomics Research

8 October 2004

U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee (WA-01) announced today that Kirkland-based Userspace has received a Phase One Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant of $194,000. This grant, part of a two-year project, is expected to reach $394,000 overall once Userspace receives anticipated government funding of $200,000 next year pending the satisfactory progress of the project.

The grant will be used for distributed protein processing using multiple networked instrument routers connected to Mass Spectrometers. These instruments can be controlled using Userspace's BioInstrument Manager platform, and the algorithms can independently process data in parallel or offline as they emerge in large data sets from one or many Mass Spectrometers.

"This announcement is great news for Userspace and the dynamic products they are developing to help scientists explore proteins and human genetics,” said Inslee. “This funding is a boost to Userspace's efforts to create technologies that fuel discoveries in the fields of medicine and biology. It is wonderful that the federal government recognizes that improvements in the flow of information for the life science industry lead to substantial social and scientific benefits. If our region is to remain a competitive biotech hub, it is important for the federal government to continue to recognize our Northwest small businesses with SBIR funding."

Said Sanjaya Joshi, co-founder of Userspace and the Principal Investigator, "With protein characterization now one of the cornerstones of Systems Biology, real-time mass spectrometry will spearhead the understanding of disease processes. Userspace is developing its bioinstrument router to facilitate this process."

The research will be conducted at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Washington. Dr. David Goodlett, Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, will be a consultant on the project.

"With tens of thousands of different protein types expressed in a cell over six-orders of magnitude, the business of understanding biology through Proteomics is a very complex endeavor," said Goodlett. "We are committed to increasing the throughput and data quality of mass spectrometry experiments using real-time control and analysis technologies such as the one this grant to Userspace supports."

Incorporated in 1999, Userspace provides products and services to increase the efficiency and productivity of proteomics and flow cytometry.