Great treatment for brain diseases

 Great treatment for brain diseases

On Monday, October 24th, we’re going to be hosting a couple livestream sessions — three different sessions over five days — at NIPS. And we’ll be showing you how companies are being treated well by a government agency. This isn’t the first time that the NIH has done this sort of thing, but now that public health has become a bigger issue, we don’t want to let this sort of thing slip.

The NIH approach is to advocate for “productivity-driven technical innovations in technology driven approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.” The idea is to streamline the process by not telling companies to cut corners and to allow companies to use grants as the basis for current and future projects.

The NIH grants mean that companies can get to the treatment stage — that’s when all that NIH money gets invested. Who needs a panel of experts in drug development, when NIH grants can fund all the answers?

Another notable thing about NIH grants is that the company has to write a management report every year about how they use the money they get from NIH.

That means that the company that sponsored this year’s seminars will have to publish some management bulletins about how well they are spending their funding — whether the company is even able to answer the questions that the NIH.

In the 2017 grants review, NIH says in their statement that the criteria for awards is to ensure that:

$5.3 billion of the total $5.3 billion (69%) will have an impact of greater than $500 million in excess of projects published in scientific literature and projects by the Innovative Discovery and Development.

The American Diabetes Association is a sounding board for the NIH. They helped fund an NIH workshop this year and then funded a NIH workshop for diabetes trials in 2015. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, the diabetes industry gets its money just like the NIH, so the money that most firs-time participants get does not matter. From the entrepreneur’s perspective, funding isn’t likely to influence the start-up.

From 2005 to 2012, 81 companies that took NIH money and competed for IPOS, IPO, or merger and acquisition have ended up going public. Of those 81 companies, 24 ended up going public and 40 ended up falling into the IPO or merger category.

We can see a similar trend as well, with 732 companies that were eligible for NIH grants funding out funding out 907 IPOs. Of those venture-backed IPOs, 25 ended up going public, 543 ended up seeing smaller acquisitions, 763 made total acquisitions and 51 achieved a merger and acquisition.

The other major goal for the NIH is to create a more inclusive and cross-cutting biomedical research ecosystem. Among the 28 types of grants that the NIH gives out, three of those main buckets of funding are in five field-specific grant types. They include:

Early Stage Institute Grants (10 percent)

Geriatric, Aging, and Brain Impairment (24 percent)

Innovation Related and Accomplishments (18 percent)

Women in Science Innovation (27 percent)

Everything else (31 percent)

In the last quarter of 2017, NIH spokesperson William Grover told a journal that they are creating four different types of grants to improve diversity and inclusion:

Research Grant for Minority and Women in Sciences (20 percent)

Research Grant for Diversity in Undergraduate, Graduate, and Postdoctoral Research Fields (10 percent)

Funding Pools for Diverse Teams (10 percent)

Swift Grants for Community-Based Academia (10 percent)

Research Grant for Emerging Innovations for Research Communities (15 percent)

There are also 3 peer-reviewed papers written every six months on NIH grants by 10–12 scientists. The NIH doesn’t directly fund biomedical journals, but they do fund other scientific publications as part of their support of journals. Over the last six years, there have been 69 peer-reviewed manuscripts. Of those, 14 were developed as part of NIH research grants.

Besides the new NIH studies, the NIH is also funding those publications with a grant called the Institute-Focused Advancement Design Program (IPAD). The project runs from June 2017 to May 2018. If you want to create a research program to test your hypothesis, how do you get the money? Well, the NIH says,

Or you can make it possible for one (IAD program) at a time or group of laboratories to work on the larger (UN) strategic objective of a group of research groups to research, develop, refine, and deploy a single small program.

So basically, for little amounts of money, you get a future company that’s going to grow big (with $1,000,000 from NIH). You even get the advantage of the NIH review process.

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