The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) announced a new NCI SBIR Bridge Award funding opportunity which will make available up to $10 million in fiscal year 2010. The Bridge Award is designed to support the next stage of development for previously funded NIH-wide SBIR Phase II projects in the areas of cancer therapies, diagnostics, and cancer imaging technologies. The application due date for the Bridge Award is March 2, 2010.
Bridge funding helps small businesses overcome the funding gap known as the “Valley of Death” between the end of the SBIR Phase II award and the subsequent round of financing needed to advance a product or service toward commercialization, which is especially critical during these economic times. The Bridge Award represents a cutting-edge new model for both the NCI and Investors to share in the investment risk in order to accelerate the most promising small business innovations to commercialization.
The new Bridge funding opportunity that is now available will fund up to 10 small business projects. Each small business can apply for up to three million dollars over three years (one million per year). To learn more about NCI’s SBIR Program and the Bridge Award, visit http://sbir.cancer.gov.
The NCI SBIR Development Center has recently provided Bridge Award funding to six companies for the development of innovative cancer technologies and is committed to funding more companies with this new funding opportunity. To learn more about the cutting-edge work that funded companies are doing to advance cancer prevention, treatment, and detection, see below.
• Lpath Therapeutics, Inc. - $3.0M for the commercialization of ASONEP™, a first-in-class monoclonal antibody against the angiogenic growth factor S1P.
• OptoSonics - $3.0M for the development of a photoacoustic computed tomography (CT) scanner for preclinical molecular imaging.
• Guided Therapeutics, Inc. - $2.5M for the development of LightTouch®, a point-of-care device for cervical cancer screening.
• Gamma Medica-Ideas, Inc. - $3.0M for the development of a novel molecular breast imaging technique to guide early-stage patient care.
• Altor BioScience Corporation - $3.0M for the development of a bifunctional T cell receptor-based immunotherapeutic directed against multiple cancer types.
• Koning Corporation - $3.0M for the development of a cone beam breast CT scanner.
