NIH’s Small Business Program (SBIR) https://sbir.nih.gov with funding for over $1 billion in annual investments has driven critical biomedical innovation and discovery. A new interactive Mapping Tool https://sbir.nih.gov/stories highlights 50 plus small businesses in the U.S with stories behind healthcare products and services that the SBIR program has supported through grants.
The Mapping Tool complements the existing suite of tools used to explore the collection of over 1,500 life science and healthcare companies that NIH invests in each year. The interactive Mapping Tool can also help users find information funding institutes, woman or minority owned businesses, and much more.
NIH’s small business funding has enabled BioMedomics https://www.biomedomics.com in North Carolina to pivot from a rapid blood test for diagnosing sickle cell to developing a rapid COVID-19 blood test capable of providing results within 15 minutes. The company has teamed up with BD, https://bd.com/en-us, a global medical technology company, to distribute the test in the U.S. pending authorization by FDA.
BrightOutcome https://www.brightoutcome.com in Illinois serves primarily the National Cancer Institute (NCI) https://sbir.cancer.gov. With small business funding from NCI’s SBIR awards, the development of three key products has been initiated. The first of three key products includes ePROmeasure™ an advanced web-based electronic PRO solution designed for health providers, researcher, clinical trial managers, and life sciences professionals to provide secure ePRO research insights.
BrightOutcome’s second key product is MyCaringCircle ™ which gives patients a secure location to store their cancer care information, keep track of their cancer-related events, keep a private journal, and report on cancer related symptoms to alert their provider.
The third key product SymptomCareAnywhere™ (SCA) is designed to reduce the burden of self- management for cancer patients in outpatient care settings or at home. The SCA system allows patients to self-report more than a dozen cancer-related symptoms and when indicators are reported as moderate to severe, a care team member is alerted automatically via email or an alert.
The company, Eyenuk https://eyenuk.com in California is a company using artificial intelligence to prevent diabetic retinopathy. With funding from National Eye Institute (NEI) https://www.nei.nih.gov and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Engineering (NIBIB) https://www.nibib.nih.gov through Small business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants, has enabled the company to develop EyeArt, an AI screening system which is an automated analysis platform to help increase screening access for diabetics.