M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Date: April 2008
Duration: 0 / 15:07
Okay, let's move on. Next speaker, Deborah Mansfield.
Deborah has been working here at M. D. Anderson for nine years and then is
now the director for the Life Sciences part of Houston Technology
Center and we already heard another person from Houston Technology
Center talk in one of the earlier sessions, and she's gonna tell us all
about how to get to other kind of grant funding, other mechanisms by
state, angels, whatever else is out there. And she has science
background, MBA backgrounds, so with that said, you're on.
Thank you. And our challenge is to get to the next slide up
which is fine. I see my name. That's cool. That's
cool. That's one thing. Working at a technology center, one
can't find one's technical--
[ Simultaneous Talking ]
That's right. And I know that some of you are not in here.
They're watching us live right now. I've got several
e-mails. People are out of state right now. There's another
cancer-related meeting going on and all these people will watch this on
the webcast or a podcast. So, even though a few seats are empty,
we know that you guys are watching.
Thanks Olli. Thank you for this opportunity and it's great to be
back here at M. D. Anderson. I came from your place. I came
from the bench. I came with an advanced degree. I wanted to
move forward and enable technology and it led me to M.B.A., and then
somewhere along the line I became the pre-awards grants major for all
of M. D. Anderson Cancer Center clearing 90 to 120 million a month out
of the organization from 98 to 2000 with 5.5 people and we try to make
it happen. So much has changed and I'm really excited to see the
growth here at M. D. Anderson. So, I'm the non-delusional
gal. I'm the person who really is a firm believer in individual's
boot strapping and how can we address the gap. And so we're gonna
move through some information rather quickly, and as a scientist with a
background similar to yours, it's all about data and information.
So I have just from a housekeeping standpoint, it's my understanding
Oli has provided to you some copies of information that I've given
you. I have a URL resource for you, all the URLs that are in the
presentation or on the worksheet. I've given you contacts for the
federal government. That's another worksheet, and then some
examples of some of the funding agencies that I'll talk about with the
federal government that might be appropriate for you to look to.
So, with no further adieu, let's move forward with this. So
basically, there are a variety of ways that one can fund. We've
got our famous four. Our founder, family, friends and then some
referred to as fools. You may have the potential of being able to
take out a loan. Let's say you've had a great first career.
You've been able to accumulate certain things that can be lateralize,
maybe involved with a business that may have receivables or have
inventory. This may be another resource, but we're not gonna deal
with loans here today and some of these others. We're gonna be
talking about grants, angel capital and a new one that we're trying to
investigate the Houston Technology Center as an accelerator for 20 plus
life sciences companies here in the region, foundations as a resource
for early funding, clinical, preclinical. It's not just urban
legend. It's happening. So, I'll give you a little bit of
that at the end. I know you've already covered this and so I'm
not gonna go into this. That's kind of like preaching to the
choir over and over. You need to have a plan. And so this
slide and the next two are basically covering some of the material that
you've already had. You need to know where you're going.
You need to know you're strategy. You need to have certain
resources because what you're doing is you're persuading. You're
trying to have people believe in you at a variety of levels on paper,
it maybe believing you from the perspective of a presentation or to an
investor. Do they believe that you can get the project
done? Factors of success, these are all pieces that are in the
business plan overview that I'm sure that you all had gotten earlier in
the project. So take heart and look at this because many of the
types of funding that you've heard, even inside here at the tip for
outside with grants of the federal government or moving forward the
emerging technology fund. They are looking for your plan and your
strategy. So that pre-work that I begged you to take seriously is
you need to develop your elevator pitch. It may not be
perfect. We need to be able to communicate. And as Cathy
said yes to your middle school person or your golfing buddy or to
somebody in the checkout line because you never know where you're gonna
network and find a potential resource. The person in shorts
waiting in line with a gallon of milk may be a venture capitalist that
you would say, "Oh my gosh!" And they just happen to say, what do
you do for a living? Because there's 5 people in front of you,
you know H-E-B or wherever. Business plan, again you'll see that
there is the need for information about your commercialization plan and
by having even a rough
sketched business plan, you're gonna be able to move forward more
successfully. And then the other is and I stress this is that not
every investor is gonna be your size, shape and type of investor.
Some investors maybe only interested in oil and gas and if you apply to
them, you take the time, it's your time, it's your money, it's their
time. It may go into the traditional circular file. You
have to know which investors are interested in the life sciences sector
and that's what I mean by a savvy interested network. So let's
move into the federal grants program. We have government grants
and again as we had corrected, the state organization here at Texas had
erroneously called the first part of the program the Grant
Program. So that's been incorrect. We now call it the
Awards from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. And my focus
today is on the federal grant program. Now, many of you in this
room probably are being paid off with a grant, a traditional NIH grant,
an NCI grant. You may have had to put together some information
for a grant. You may have had to work up part of the budget on
the grant. So these yes are grants, but they're somewhat
different in the traditional development and basic research
grant. One is called the SBIR or the Small Business Innovation
Research Program. And the difference between these two is really
where does the project leader have the project? Is that project
leader are what we call in science the principal investigator?
Are they in the company 51 percent of the time are greater or are they
at the research institution 51% or greater? So, that's
kind of the rule on this. If the investigator with the project
lead is with the company, you apply for an SBIR. If that project
lead is a subcontract from a company to a university and has 51%
of their time paid by that university, you'll apply through the STTR
program or the small business technology transfer program. Now,
what's different is from the federal grants that you're used to, is
that it was the principal investigator at the institution, M.D.
Anderson that applied these grants it's the company that applies.
It's the company who's the applicant. It's the company who
receives the dollars. So, a location for you to find information,
as I said, I'm very information oriented in this presentation is if you
go to www.sba.gov. This is a small business administration.
They cover a number of loan programs for businesses that are doing very
well and need loan support or microloans but again, a big part of their
program also is to coordinate and set aside from Federal agencies,
every year specifically to encourage commercialization from small
business. One SBA resource that's in town here that I would also
encourage you to familiarize yourself with is the University of Houston
Small Business Development Center. They have library facilities
there with business information. They have specialist that will
be able to walk you through an SBA loan, in SBIR or in STTR
application. They have individuals that are accountants,
attorneys, et cetera and this is all paid by your tax dollars, isn't
that wonderful. It's something that we can actually get from our
taxpayer, dollars. Again, the caveat though is you have to be a
small business. So, as far as the SBIR, STTR resources, you know,
we all have our favorite search engine. Of these two web sites,
either www.sbir.gov or zyn.com, Zyn is the kind of the white-face
Google not very much there on the page, go right to the length, you go
right there. It will give you information about funding searchers
where are conferences. Many times M. D. Anderson hosts a
conference here on SBIRs or STTRs. So, it's basically giving you
the how to, the due dates as well as and this is most important, in our
institution here at M. D. well, not our, I can't say our I'm in the
lump site so I can't say our. You have awardees working on STTR
and SBIR applications as well as who have been awarded. There's a
way of finding out who they are, buy them a coffee, find out how they
did it. So, basically it's a federal grant, their forms and as we
all know, the federal grant program has moved to electronic
process. It's competitive. There are certain
deadlines. NIH is great because you can apply 3 times a year but
in some federal agencies, it's only once a year. So if you pass
the deadline just like what Dr. Wenker had mentioned here the deadline
for the last TIF is passed, you have to wait till the next round.
Of course there are regulations. There are regulations for this
of humans, the use of animals. There's certain kind of contract
requirements. The submission is electronic and of course it has
the post-award reporting but different from the emerging technology
fund. This is non-delusional. It is a grant. You have
a reporting requirement. You do not have to pay the money
back. If you don't spend it sometimes, you have to return
it. So basically, the websites that I have given you will give
you how to apply. There are 3 phases. These are in
series. You have to apply for one before you can apply to the
next phase and the next phase. There are over 12 federal agencies
that may fit your solution and every year, there are topics.
They'll say what are the citizens of the United States need from the
specific agency? For example, after 9/11, they were very
interested in locking mechanisms for containers that were coming from
ships but the next year, they have a different topic, a different
requirement. One thing that I wanna help you with is the coding
for this when you look up the actual information. The STTR is
called an R41 for phase 1 and R42 and the SBIRs are R42 and R43, excuse
me R43, type 1, I apologize, 43 and 44. So here I've copied out
of the actual SBIR application guide the letter of the law per what is
the phase 1 and as Cathy had mentioned, this is really the proof of
concept. One thing that's great about the TIF grant, you can
actually get a few data points that will allow this application to be
more successful. You don't necessarily have to posture the way
and only have and have no data but it is recommended. Again, as I
have said, I've included these slides for your information. This
fully describes phase 2 and phase 3 is not funded. This is when
they're actually wanting you to actually launch the commercialization
process. Again, for some of you, you may think only of the NIH to
apply but you also have the NCI, your Department of Defense, National
Science Foundation and also NASA may actually need your solutions for
human kind. I've given you websites here for there are two types
for registrations, its grants.gov and also for this submission.
This is, you can do this already as company individuals. You can
actually register. M. D. Anderson has already registered with
grants.gov. Well, let's move into another type of funding which
is different than the grant. Basically, this is an equity-type of
funding. We have, Evan is gonna give us a little bit more
about BCs but an angel is an individual in the community of high
network that's interested in putting equity dollars into a company but
also kind of taking it on as a project. They'll be involved most
likely on the board and with helping the company to determine what kind
of resources it needs. I wanted to give you specifically a
location here at Houston using an angel network, here is their web site
and again like I said we have such a brief period of time here but I
want you to know we do have an angel group. They syndicate with
other angel groups. Again, there's a due diligence process very
similar to what we've talked about here for other funds and here are two
great resources, one the Kauffman Foundation. It gives
entrepreneurial help. It's a great resource but also you can
actually get the locations of other angel networks through the
angelcapitaleducation.org. And finally, check with sponsored
programs about this silence source, this urban legend. Yesterday,
on FierceBiotech, the headline read, from the e-mail. If I could
just close with this, nonprofit millions flow to biotech R&D and
they give a few examples of the foundations that exists who are
actually doing this kind of funding. So with that I'd like to
close. Again, thank you for allowing me to fly through this
information but again, you have our contact information and I'd love to
take questions now or have you call me for further information.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
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