Arkana lands $266K NIH grant to sharpen kidney transplant rejection tests
What's the deal? Arkana LaboratoriesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has won a $266,613 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → to build a diagnostic test for kidney transplant patients experiencing rejection. The one-year project is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
Why it matters. T-cell mediated rejection (TCMR) occurs when a patient's immune system attacks a transplanted kidney. Treatments exist, but they fail in roughly 30–50% of cases — and physicians have no reliable way to predict at diagnosis which patients will respond.
What Arkana is building. Earlier NIAID-funded work by Dr. Shana Coley and the Arkana team identified a 27-gene signature in biopsy tissue that predicts whether TCMR will respond to standard treatment. That discovery used whole transcriptome sequencing — too slow for routine care.
With this award, the team will convert the finding into a faster qPCR-based test, targeting results within a single day. It will also build a predictive model to flag likely treatment-resistant cases at the point of diagnosis.
What's the endgame? Phase I is the first step. If it succeeds, Arkana plans to seek Phase II funding to validate the test on more samples and move it towards clinical use through its molecular diagnostics laboratory.
The team. Dr. Chris Larsen serves as principal investigator, building on Coley's research. Owen Stephens, director of Arkana's Clinical Biomarker Center, is co-investigator and lead scientist on the experimental work.
The signal. At $266,613, the award is modest capital, but a standard non-dilutive first rung for translating lab discovery into a clinical diagnostic. For precision medicine startups, SBIR grants remain a key path to fund early validation before commercial trials.
Read more: Arkana Laboratories
Image credit: Arkana Laboratories
