A Madison-based company that developed a series of products designed to fight against the bacterial pathogen that plague farmers’ crops and a Fitchburg biotech company making antimicrobial and antifungal bandages for soft tissue repairs are among six startups in Wisconsin to receive funding from the federal government and State of Wisconsin to commercialize their inventions.
The companies are:
- AmebaGone Inc. (Madison): developing proprietary technologies that use a novel biocontrol method to destroy intractable bacterial infections for agriculture and human health applications.
- Imbed Biosciences Inc. (Fitchburg): A privately held medical device company emerging as a leader in the development of advanced therapies for the treatment of burns, chronic ulcers, gastrointestinal defects and soft-tissue repair.
- NanoAffix Science (Wauwatosa): Has developed technology for real time detection of contaminants in drinking water. Graphene-based sensors with nanometer thick layers enable rapid and inexpensive quantitative onsite testing for lead in tap water.
- NCD Technologies (Madison): Specializes in engineering and optimizing new diamond and diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings for new applications. NCD Technologies' coating technologies enable the coating of standard and generally un-coatable parts.
- Stem Pharm (Madison): Leverages its expertise in biomaterials and cellular interactions to develop high-value applications of organoids (3-D in vitro models) for drug discovery and cell-friendly coatings for the manufacture of-cell based therapies.
- Filament Games (Madison): Develops award-winning digital learning games. For this award, Filament is developing RoboCo, a virtual robotics sandbox that makes engineering education fun, easy and affordable.
Wisconsin companies are annually competing for hundreds of millions of dollars in Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants issued by the U.S. government, which were designed to help small, emerging companies fund their research and development. Through the SBIR program, 11 federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health, are required to spend at least 2.8% of their outside R&D budgets with emerging companies. That amounts to at least $2.5 billion and 5,000 awards a year for research into new technologies.
The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. matches grants won by Wisconsin companies through the SBIR Advance program. Since 2014, WEDC, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Extension’s Center of Technology Commercialization, has provided nearly $8.8 million in SBIR matching-grants to 111 Wisconsin tech businesses, resulting in more than $30 million in added capital from investors and other federal grants for those companies.
“Innovation is one of the key ingredients for supporting our future economic potential and a critical piece of emerging from the challenges caused by Covid-19," Aaron Hagar, WEDC's vice president of entrepreneurship and innovation, said in a statement. "SBIR Advance helps those businesses innovative enough to capture highly competitive federal funding to convert their research into new products and business growth. Wisconsin is home to world-class research institutions and technology companies, and we are excited to provide funding to catalyze our next-generation opportunities.”
