Josh Green, general partner at MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures and three entrepreneurs visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday to testify before the House Small Business Committee about the need to reauthorize the SBIR program.
The Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital Dispatch blog reported,
“Companies receiving venture funding may have other innovation in the pipeline worth pursuing,” Green told the committee Wednesday. ”It’s for these projects that companies would apply for SBIR grants. Businesses must continue to innovate and the current SBA interpretation forces companies into an uncomfortable dilemma for worthy new projects. This scenario results in small businesses at best delaying important discovery projects and at worst abandoning this important work altogether.”
According to Venture Capital Dispatch, Committee Chair Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) asked Rachel King, chief executive of GlycoMimetics, Inc., if her company would be able to develop new research using SBIR grants that it wouldn’t otherwise be able to develop.
“Absolutely. We have a family of compounds that could be useful in a number of infectious diseases, such as HIV and tuberculosis,” King said. “We can’t focus on that program because we have to focus on our lead program. If we were able to access that funding source then we and other companies would be able to invest in more early stage, very promising research than we can now.”
All committee testimony is available on You Tube, split into 25 videos.
Filed under: Congress, In the News, SBIR, Uncategorized | Tagged: Congress, House Small Business Committee, SBIR, venture capital
[...] The SBIR/STTR program is up for renewal in the U.S., and many constituencies would like to see the programs opened up to allow venture-backed companies to receive SBIR/STTR support. [...]