Vermont EPSCoR Phase (0) Award Leads to SBIR Phase I Award

 

 
The Burlington, Vermont-based company Precision Bioassay, Inc will receive a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for their proposal "Better Bioassays via Designs for Robots Analyses with Improved Model Selection and Similarity Bounds that Limit Potency Bias." The award represents the culmination of several years of research that was sparked in 2017 by funding from Vermont EPSCoR.
 
Precision Bioassay received funding by Vermont EPSCoR for an SBIR Phase 0 award in 2017. This award, "Equivalence-based Random Effects Model Selection for Bioassay" proved very helpful in setting the company up for its success in securing a Phase I award from the NIH. The funded research looked at advances in analysis of biological assays which used equivalence testing to assess similarity and mixed models that reflected the design of the assay. Precision Bioassay demonstrated that equivalence testing could be used for random effects model selection, demonstrating benefits from using that approach.
 
"The EPSCoR project was really helpful for us," said David Lansky, PhD, President of Precision Bioassay. "The preliminary proof-of-concept work that we did with EPSCoR funding was important in a number of ways. It helped convince us that the idea behind one of the main aims of our work is sound. Dividing the work on this aim up into small steps with the first in an EPSCoR project, the second in a Phase I SBIR, and the solution for an example practical case in an SBIR Phase II was not only helpful discipline, it made the project more tractable. With a successful EPSCoR project completed, when we asked for technical help preparing our Phase I SBIR proposal, we found help from the Vermont Procurement Technical Assistance Center (PTAC). They paid for consulting help from BBCetc, a Michigan company that consults, helping organizations prepare SBIR proposals; that help really improved our SBIR proposal."
 
Precision Bioassay is a Vermont-based statistical consulting and software development company that specializes in statistical methods for biological assays of pharmaceutical proteins and vaccines. For more information about this company, please visit https://www.precisionbioassay.com.
 
For more information about Vermont EPSCoR's SBIR Phase (0) program, please visit ?node=45.