Session puts companies, agencies together
Eastern Washington companies looking for grants will get a one-day session next week with four federal agencies that can invest millions of dollars to push good ideas from drawing board into production.
The Pacific Northwest Biomedicine and Life Sciences Summit runs next Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Davenport Hotel in downtown Spokane. It’s being presented by the Washington Technology Center, based in Seattle.
The session gives entrepreneurs direct access to grant experts from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Department of Defense and the NASA.
Through grants designed to help small businesses, those four agencies have more than $2 billion invested in life sciences projects, according to a press release from the Washington Technology Center.
WTC spokesperson Kerry Alexander said the session is for companies already getting federal grants and those exploring the prospect of seeking dollars. Registration is $100 and can be done through the Washington Technology Center Web site: www.watechcenter.org.
Dan Roark, CEO of Spokane-based Matrical Inc., plans to attend, looking at options to help develop a new product. Matrical, which has about 30 employees, produces advanced storage and compound-handling devices for pharmaceutical companies.
The company is in the second year of a three-year SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) grant, and Roark said the company is looking at a second application.
“It would be nice if there were ways to find Defense Department support for a project we have,” said Roark. “I’m going to be there (at the session), so that indicates we think this event can be beneficial.
The first Matrical SBIR came to $852,000 and will help the company develop a device that preserves frozen chemicals to keep them from losing their potency.
Roark said Matrical’s next SBIR could be to develop a new design for a thermal cycler, a lab machine that can multiply DNA samples. Matrical has a patent for the machine but would need funding to take the product into production, said Roark.
The session is underwritten by a federal grant given to the WTC to encourage economic development among state tech companies.
Data kept by the federal government shows that 50 percent of businesses trained under such programs won grants, compared with less than 10 percent of those that did not receive training.
The session next week will feature program coordinators from NASA and other agencies. They include: Dr. Marvin Stoldosky, of the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research; Terry McCune, from the defense department’s Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity program; Geoffrey Lee, director of technology from NASA’s Ames Research Center; and Dr. Jeffrey Sutton, director of NASA’s National Space Biomedical Research Institute.
The day’s keynote address will be from Dr. Greg Belenky, head of Washington State University Spokane’s sleep research program.