Amy Baxter, SBIR Recipient

The SBIR has allowed our team to change over 100 million lives worldwide by reducing the pain of injections and IVs, and to reverse intractable low back pain and opioid use. I'd never have made the impact I wanted to in the world without it.

The story started long ago - my grandfather wrote science fiction, and left a prize to promote commercial spaceflight to elevate humanity. As a doctor, I wanted to make a difference like he did, and find a health-related fulcrum, and build a lever to elevate humanity above pain. As a pediatric emergency doctor it gradually dawned that to change healthcare on a humanity rather than trench warfare level, legislation, public recognition or research were the only ways.

I started researching vaccination pain, and invented a device to stave off vaccine hesitancy rooted in pain. After a move prompted being temporarily without an academic appointment, SBIR funding was the only way to do proper research but translate the results into something that touched patients. We received 1.3M, and the research we did has spawned 119 independent RCTs, and it's been used 28 countries for over 250 million medical procedures.

When someone used Buzzy to not take oxycontin after a total knee replacement, I figured if one person in recovery could use it not to take opioids, so could others. I stopped practicing to learn more, and was funded by NIDA in a fast track to solve low back pain, which apparently is the #1 place for outpatient opioid initiation leading to chronic use.

7 years later, we delivered - we prevented acute transitioning to chronic pain, and completely resolved dysfunction due to inoperable pain for 27%. For a dear friend with a child on opioids 10 months after a surgery, the SBIR funding allowed the device to exist that got her off. My best friend in high school overdosed on heroin - without the SBIR, none of these ideas, papers, science, or vaccinated patients would exist.

But for me to know that one person won't spiral down the addiction pathway - that would not have happened without the funding.