CosmosID Announces Oncobiome Partnership with the White House Cancer Moonshot Initiative

ROCKVILLE, Md., Oct. 17, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today CosmosID announced participation in Vice President Biden's National Cancer Moonshot, which aims to accelerate progress in preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer. CosmosID will provide access to its automated bioinformatics platform, MetaGenID, for five cancer microbiome research studies (valued at $150,000) to understand how the microbiome (i.e. oral, gut, and skin) contributes to development of specific cancers.

This new effort will focus on those human cancers in which changes in the microbial community and/or association of specific microbes have been linked to gastric, lung, oral, pancreatic, or cervical cancers. For these five cancer studies, data collected in the analyses will be made freely available to researchers to answer critical questions concerning the microbiome and its role in development, management, and treatment of human cancers.

CosmosID MetaGenID contains over 65,000 highly curated microbial genomes and is capable of ultra-rapid high resolution strain level identification of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites, and also provides antibiotic resistance and virulence marker profiling.

During his 2016 State of the Union Address, President Obama called on Vice President Biden to lead a new National Cancer Moonshot focused on making a decade's worth of progress in preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer in five years - ultimately striving to end cancer as we know it. A Presidential Memorandum on January 28, 2016 established the Cancer Moonshot Task Force.

In its contribution to the Cancer Moonshot initiative, CosmosID launched a web portal (www.cosmosid.com/cancermoonshot) to facilitate applications by scientists and researchers for access to the MetaGenID bioinformatics tool for cancer microbiome studies. "There are many pieces of the cancer puzzle to figure out and we are very pleased to offer our support by providing high resolution microbiome characterization to help in both early detection and therapeutic development" said Manoj Dadlani, CosmosID's CEO.

Dr. Rita Colwell, former Director of the National Science Foundation and founder of CosmosID, said, "We are honored and pleased  to be a part of the Cancer Moonshot and seek better understanding of the complex role of microorganisms in cancer, including causation, treatment, and prevention." On October 17^th Dr. Colwell will attend Vice President Biden's release of the final report of the Cancer Moonshot Task Force and Executive Findings at the White House. This announcement takes place after Vice President Biden has traveled to many of the major centers in the cancer community. He will also unveil a new set of Federal actions, private sector actions, and collaborative partnerships to further advance the goals of the Cancer Moonshot Task Force.

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About CosmosID
CosmosID®, based in Rockville, Maryland, is a genomics big data company focused on rapid identification of microorganisms for molecular diagnostics, public health, food safety, agriculture, and environmental applications. The CosmosID platform uses proprietary sequence analysis algorithms to accurately profile all microorganisms in a metagenomic sample by employing next-generation DNA sequencing. To learn more please visit http://www.cosmosid.com.

SOURCE CosmosID

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