Six hundred people traveled to Atlanta’s Omni Hotel this week to attend the National Institutes of Health’s very successful 10th Annual SBIR/STTR Conference. This conference, celebrating the Silver Anniversary of SBIR inception, drew entrepreneurs, biotech business owners, researchers, university faculty and licensing staff, state representatives, and investors from around the nation.
More than fifty NIH and CDC staff members were on hand to conduct one-on-one guidance sessions, workshops, and submission instruction sessions. University licensing and tech transfer associates, investors, and previous NIH SBIR/STTR awardees gave advice from their perspectives in sessions and during networking events. From a pool of submissions, fifty companies had been selected to present their SBIR/STTR findings via a poster session; this honor allowed the previous recipients to demonstrate how SBIR/STTR funding had helped advance their research.
For 2008, the NIH’s Omnibus SBIR/STTR solicitation still has the August 5th and December 5th submission dates for Non-AIDS related topics and September 7th and January 7th for AIDS related topics.