IOWA CITY, Iowa--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Emerging health IT start-up HealthTech Solutions has received a notice of award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant totaling $238,400. The grant will be used to support research and development of the company’s proprietary software to make organ transplant communication more efficient and effective.
Organ transplant is a complicated, time-sensitive process that relies on hundreds of phone calls and faxes per donated organ. This inefficient communication contributes to over 50 percent of available organs going to waste; meanwhile, 22 patients die each day in the US waiting for a life-saving organ, over 120,000 people continue to wait for a major organ transplant, with wait times up to five years.
The NIH granted only 526 out of over 4,000 SBIR Phase I applications in 2016, with only three from Iowa, where HealthTech Solutions has its corporate base. Upon completion of the Phase I SBIR project, HealthTech Solutions has the opportunity to pursue an additional $1-2 million in grant funding via a NIH SBIR Phase II proposal.
“The SBIR grant program is incredibly competitive, and this award provides great validation of the problem we are working to resolve as well as the positive impact that our technology is likely to have on the transplant community,” said Dalton Shaull, CEO/Co-Founder. “Having received an experimental transplant myself, I am passionate about the field of organ transplantation, and our team is thrilled that our hard work has paid off with a successful award.”
About the NIH SBIR Program
The United States Congress created the SBIR program in 1982. These programs congressionally require eligible governmental agencies to set aside a percentage of their extramural budget so that domestic small businesses can engage in R&D that has a strong potential for technology commercialization. The goals of the SBIR program include stimulating technological innovation and increasing private sector commercialization of innovations developed through federal R&D funding. Eleven federal agencies have SBIR programs. Federal agencies with extramural research budgets over $100 million are required to set-aside a certain percentage of their budget to the SBIR program.
