Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today announced it has awarded a grant to the newly established Duke Molecular Physiology Institute. The DMPI research team is using Agilent's integrated biology solutions to gain new insights into the metabolic and physiologic aspects of major chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease.

DMPI is headed by Dr. Christopher Newgard, professor at Duke University School of Medicine's Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology and director of the Sarah W. Stedman Nutrition and Metabolism Center and the Institute for Molecular Physiology.

"The Duke Molecular Physiology Institute seeks to combine strong genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics platforms with computational biology, clinical translation and basic science expertise to gain new insights into the mechanisms of cardiometabolic diseases," said Dr. Newgard. "We thank Agilent for supporting our research and look forward to collaborating to advance the understanding of cardiovascular and undiagnosed metabolic diseases."

Dr. Newgard's pathway-centric research is powered by Agilent's GC/MS, triple quadrupole LC/MS and quadrupole time-of-flight LC/MS systems along with software such as MassHunter Workstation with ChemStation in association with the Agilent-Fiehn GC/MS Metabolomics RTL Library and MassHunter Qualitative Software using METLIN Personal Metabolite Database and Library. Agilent's GeneSpring GX software, Mass Profiler Pro and Pathway Architect will provide critical capabilities in data integration and pathway directed interpretation.

"We are pleased to support Dr. Newgard and his team at Duke for their pioneering translational research," said Steve Fischer, Agilent's director of 'Omics Applications, who is working closely with the team. "They will use the power of integrating different 'omics data to better understand complex disease mechanisms and map out previously unknown pathways to disease phenotypes. This should accelerate their understanding of complicated processes in cardiometabolic diseases and lead to the faster development of treatments."

"We are strong proponents of applying an integrated approach to solving important health problems such as cardiometabolic disease," added Leo Bonilla, Agilent's director of Integrated Biology. "We look forward to following Dr. Newgard's pioneering research at Duke."