PROVIDENCE — In the not-too-distant future, as imagined by the biotechnology firm NABsys Inc., all newborns will have their genomes sequenced at the hospital, allowing doctors to project vulnerabilities to disease and recommend preventative behaviors or treatments.

Yesterday, the Providence company came a small step closer to making that a reality.

Two scientists affiliated with NABsys have been awarded nearly $1 million in grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The money will help the small firm hire additional scientists to research more affordable methods of sequencing a person’s genome — a procedure that now costs as much as $5 million, according to the NIH.

NABsys research is also focusing on uncovering connections between specific genes and illnesses.

The NIH grants announced yesterday — eight in all, totaling $15 million — are designed to promote research into technologies that could bring down the cost of DNA sequencing to $1,000 per person.

“It’s working on an incredibly important problem, some would say the most important problem in medicine,” Barrett Bready, president and chief executive officer of NABsys, said in an interview yesterday.

The awards for research into the NABsys technology went to Xinsheng Sean Ling, a Brown University physics professor and NABsys consultant, and John S. Oliver, the company’s vice president for research and development. Ling received $820,000, Oliver $498,000.

Oliver’s was the only grant given to a private company, with the rest reserved for university researchers throughout the United States and Canada.

“In terms of the prestige, it’s very significant,” Bready said. “But the money is always important for life sciences start-ups.”

NABsys, which has only four full-time employees, is attempting to raise $1 million in private investment to speed up its research, conducted at Brown and in a company laboratory.

It has already generated $750,000 this summer, Bready said.

The company has also benefited from $475,000 in investments from the Slater Technology Fund, a taxpayer-backed organization that supports start-up companies.

In 2005, Brown took an ownership stake in NABsys and agreed to license to the company the rights to commercialize discoveries made at Brown related to the NABsys method of DNA sequencing.

NABsys says it hopes to one day manufacture equipment that will sequence a person’s genome using nanopore technology.

That technology, Bready says, will significantly advance the field of “personalized medicine,” in which doctors will be able to determine a person’s predisposition for diseases and then design individualized dietary and pharmacological regimes.

For now, doctors must rely on a person’s family history for insight into potential genetic predispositions to illnesses.

The NABsys technology would also be used at oncology centers, helping doctors gain a more detailed analysis of cancer cells before determining the treatment, according to Bready, a Brown graduate who now teaches a course in biotechnology at the university.

“The NABsys sequencing platform, Hybridization-Assisted Nanopore Sequencing, combines nanopore sequencing and sequencing by hybridization to create a platform that is much more powerful than either alone,” Oliver said in a statement yesterday. “These awards will help accelerate the work of our interdisciplinary team as they refine the physics, biochemistry, and computer science associated with HANS.”

bgedan@projo.com