Dan Rodgers, SBIR Recipient

I sacrificed a highly successful academic career as a tenured full professor and director of a large interdisciplinary center at a research I university to found a biotech startup. My motivation was highly personal; the deaths of both parents and diagnosis of three other family members with a severe muscle wasting disease. A colleague and I had recently patented a gene therapeutic to combat muscle wasting, one that could work for a variety of disease indications, but we couldn't build a biotech company in my small rural community.

My wife shared my conviction and accepted a job at the NIH so we could move the company and family to Maryland's biotech hub. I landed my first SBIR grant a year later and have since received four more, launching our company into legitimacy and helping to reach our developmental milestones. A critical aspect of our program is addressing the heterogeneity of muscle wasting diseases. This includes pathologies in skeletal muscle and the heart as well as nutritional abnormalities, all of which cannot be studied with a single SBIR grant.

The current political morass in Washington allowed the SBIR program to expire, placing two grants, $3.4M and our drug development program at risk. If resolved quickly, this would represent only a speed bump in our timeline. If not, it could risk our entire program as we're attempting to navigate the infamous "valley of death"; the gap between government and venture capital funding.