Two healthcare startups are living proof that sometimes the government really is here to help. Two companies that have already received grants from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute Industry Forum money were at an event yesterday in Louisville to promote a new funding program. SMARTCAP ACCEL is replacing the original fund to help companies develop products and services that can work on Earth and in space.
Leaders of both companies were in Louisville along with Dorit Donoviel of the NSBRI Industry Forum to announce the new fund.
Pulsar Informatics won a SMARTCAP award in 2011 and Cerebrotech Medical Systems won $250,000 this year. Pulsar’s product went from space to Earth. It started as a software solution for checking the cognitive state of astronauts. Dr. Daniel Mollicone used the funding from NSBRI to adapt the psychomotor vigilence test to measure fatigue and fitness for duty in long-haul truckers.
“We have now made space-born technology useful on earth and each day has been a day forward based on that seed funding,” Mollicone said.
Cerebrotech’s president and CEO Mitch Levinson said he was skeptical when a lead investor first told him about the grant program.
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“When I first spoke with Dorit, I told her small startups with limited resources can’t divert resrouces to build a device for astronauts,” said Levinson, a serial medial device entrepreneur.
Cerebrotech has licensed technology from Berkley to create a non-invasive, continuous monitor to track cerebral bleeding and edema after stroke and brain trauma.
NASA had noticed a pattern of ocular injuries in astronauts and doctors thought that this was due to intercranial pressure.
“We used the money to do things we would have done anyway, but we can do them better and faster with help from NASA,” he said.
Levinson said that his company has also benefited from collaborating with top researchers and engineers in the field of non-invasive neuro science.
Donoviel said compared the growing space industry to where aviation was years ago.
“There are now millions of flights each day and it is routine, that is the future of space flight,” she said.
Even though the space shuttle is permanently docked, there are still many opportunities on the International Space Station for research in materials science and pharmaceutical discovery. The http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/nlab/ US National Lab on the Space Station offers a place do to unique research in a micro-gravity environment which is ideal for growing crystals to understand the shape of proteins.
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[Image from NASA Goddard Space Flight]