Cobio awarded a $2.2M NIH SBIR Fast-Track grant!
We are thrilled to announce that we have been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Fast-Track grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in the amount of $2.2 million. The award begins this month and will fund the next chapter of our mission: a diagnostic that enables clinicians to treat bacterial infections in one shift.
The award supports the development of our rapid diagnostic for urinary tract infections, which uses MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry to identify the causative organism directly from the specimen in seven hours or less — no culture step, no overnight wait, and results in time to act on the same shift the sample arrives.
What Fast-Track means
NIH SBIR grants are normally awarded in two sequential stages: Phase I establishes technical feasibility, and companies that succeed then compete separately for Phase II funding to advance the technology toward the market. A Fast-Track award compresses that process. Both phases are submitted and peer-reviewed in a single application, and both are funded up front, contingent on meeting a defined set of Phase I milestones. Fast-Track awards are relatively uncommon, and reviewers grant them only when the commercial case and the research plan are both strong enough to justify committing to the full arc of the work at the outset. For us, it removes a funding gap that would otherwise sit between feasibility and development, and it lets the team move continuously from one to the next.
The work ahead
Phase I runs six months and has two overall objectives: verifying phage amplification in MALDI-TOF, and completing a pre-submission to the FDA to align early on our regulatory pathway.
Phase II runs two years and builds on that foundation. We will demonstrate the performance of the diagnostic direct from urine, validate it against urine culture — the current standard of care, which takes 24 to 48 hours to return a result — and develop software that makes the assay straightforward for a technician to run and interpret.
Thank you
This award builds directly on the work funded by previous NIH and NSF SBIR Phase I and Phase II grants, which established the feasibility of our approach and carried it through early development. We are grateful to NIDDK and the National Institutes of Health for this investment, and to the advisors, clinical collaborators, and partners whose contributions have been instrumental at every stage.
Research reported in this post is supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 1R44DK146594. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.