bizblip: Tell me about this new $1.1M Phase II SBIR grant.
Francis Creighton, President and CEO, UNandUP: Yes, we’re very happy and honored to receive this phase two SBIR award from the NHLBI. We are very thankful to be supported by local entities like BioSTL, and BioGenerator in this application, which is developing a robotic system to better treat arrhythmias in the heart… The benefit of our system is it’s small, it’s affordable, and it can be used in existing angiography suites without requiring hospitals to do room shielding or buy a new (robotic) C-Arm. More importantly 80% of all hospitals provide about 40% of all ablations and they typically cannot afford (existing solutions). So our goal is to make a robotic technology that is accessible to everybody. I want to point out that our partners include prominent physicians from Washington University: doctors Mitch Faddis and Jen Silva, in addition to Dr. Sandeep Jain at (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center), so, you know, we have some really established robotic electrophysiologist involved with our effort. I would like to say that this project is also possible thanks to our partnerships with two national laboratories, the Ames National Laboratory and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
bizblip: Will this Phase II be used for commercialization or trials?
Creighton: Oh no, we’re we’re still early on in our process. We completed a phase one grant. We had stellar results. We’re very happy with it. But the starting point for this project is, having demonstrated proof of concept, now we’re in technology development. So we are working with a international supplier of highest quality robotic arms, the one that we were getting is coming in next year. I would definitely say we’re in development stage pre-clinical device testing. We’re also starting our process of better understanding the commercialization plan. There’s various NIH programs that we participate in to make sure that we are keeping our technology focused on a commercially viable opportunity.
bizblip: Tell me about your team.
Creighton: The company was just me running grants in 2018. So in earnest, we started scaling, once we start receiving awards in 2019. Really that’s when we had brick and mortar. And to date, we have four full time employees, about six people (with) differing part time capabilities. We typically favor expertise over full time, meaning that we can’t afford some of them (full time) and quite honestly, a lot of those people are semi-retired. So we take advantage of those people wherever we can. But that said, that said we participate very aggressively with various university internship programs, especially Wash U. So I think this summer, we had like seven interns. It was it was crazy, but it was very productive. Yeah, we also, just, you know, we’ve also received six diversity supplements from the NIH, since our inception since around 2019.
bizblip: What is that?
Creighton: You know, as I said, our company is ‘unmet needs and underserved populations’. And that may sound (like we’re) looking outside of our company to what we want to address as gaps in healthcare as we know it. But we also kind of like to reverse the camera towards us to make sure that we are addressing gaps in science, and engineering, and early stage commercialization. The NIH provides this mechanism called diversity supplements, they give you some money to hire candidates who basically fill the those gaps in the employment space for the healthcare industry. So you know, we, we would hire these people no matter what, but if they fit within a diversity supplement, in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, or socio economic background, we will actually try to make sure that they have the opportunities to get a seat at the table that they normally wouldn’t be able to achieve on their own or would be less likely to be able to achieve.
We are in the process of looking for employees now, to help support the work that we have in this phase two grant. We’re looking for one to two people. We’re also expanding our space. We’re doubling our space. At the building that we’re in in Midtown. As you well know, we’ve been in stealth mode for a little while now… We have this magical year with the NIH. The NIH SBIR provides us something that is worth more than gold — the ability to say “no” to VC funds, to VC money. Typically, the rule is if someone offers you money, you take it. Right? But with the NIH SBIR we can be more thoughtful and more strategic about who we partner with.
