Cornerstone Genomics has received a combined $1.225 million in competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding from the National Science Foundation—supporting years of foundational development for CodeXome, the company’s evolutionary-genomics platform designed to drastically improve the speed, accuracy, and confidence of genomic variant interpretation.
These awards recognize the scientific strength, novelty, and real-world applicability of Cornerstone Genomics’ approach, and they significantly reinforce the company’s ongoing research and commercial growth trajectory.
A Vision Funded by Scientific Merit
The NSF’s investment directly supported the construction of CodeXome’s proprietary Deep Time Ancestry Database, a resource built from exome sequences across 55 non-human primate genera, producing roughly 2 billion curated sequence datapoints covering 19,244 genes. This unprecedented dataset provides researchers with a clear picture of how genes naturally change—or resist change—over approximately 80 million years of primate evolution.
By anchoring variant interpretation in evolutionary constraint, CodeXome addresses one of the most persistent bottlenecks in modern genomics: distinguishing meaningful, disease-linked variants from the millions of benign variants circulating across global populations.
Validation That Sets a New Standard in Genomic Interpretation
The NSF recognized not only CodeXome’s technological innovation but its validated scientific accuracy. Benchmark comparisons against expert-curated ClinGen and ENIGMA/BRCA datasets reveal a remarkable pattern:
- Benign and likely benign variants are shared across primate species,
- Pathogenic variants remain uniquely human, and
- A substantial fraction of VUS can be confidently reclassified using evolutionary insight.
These validation findings demonstrate the credibility of CodeXome’s evolutionary filter and its capacity to resolve long-standing uncertainty in clinical genetics.
A Platform Built for Speed, Precision, and Real-World Use
Support from the NSF SBIR program enabled Cornerstone Genomics to transform CodeXome into a cloud-based, user-friendly platform capable of:
- Filtering natural variants in minutes, not months,
- Providing transparent, non–black-box evolutionary alignments,
- Integrating ClinVar, gnomAD, UniProt, and other essential databases,
- Delivering a unified workflow for variant triage, interpretation, and prioritization.
This combination of speed, precision, and evolutionary rigor is already enabling breakthroughs in rare disease research, neurological disease exploration, and tertiary analysis across academic and commercial settings.
A Foundation for Future Discovery
The NSF’s early support laid the groundwork for the company’s expanding research into complex disease pathways—including PTSD, Alzheimer’s disease, and stress-response biology—and continues to guide the evolution of CodeXome’s predictive and analytical capabilities.
Today, CodeXome stands as a scientifically validated engine for variant analysis, VUS resolution, and gene-function discovery—offering a new path forward for researchers working to understand and treat inherited and complex diseases.
