Abigail Roots, Program Manager for the Joint Science and Technology Office for Chemical and Biological Defense, walks through the SBIR/STTR program: roughly 5-8 SBIR topics yearly plus one STTR every other year, targeting technologies at readiness levels 3-5. Three-phase structure moves from proof-of-concept through development to commercialization, with focus areas including medical and chemical countermeasures, digital battlespace tools, and detection or protective wearables.
Chapters
My name is Abigail Roots. I am the program manager for the Joint Science and Technology Office for Chemical and Biological Defense Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer, more commonly known as Chembio Defense Small Business. I'm going to talk to you today about our program and our areas of focus and how we hope to be able to work with more small businesses to advance the research that we look forward to utilizing in the future. What's really unique about our particular program is that we don't support one individual agency or service or laboratory. Rather, we work with a number of the DoD components in that that if there is a topic area that's specifically chemical and biological defense, we can work with that component to help fund the research. So it's more of a joint effort. Since we're joint sciences. You can think of it like the joint services. For example, if army has a topic where they're looking for textiles to develop clothing, where the user it's still comfortable and breathable fabric, however, it prevents certain chemical or biological agents from penetrating the fabric. That falls into our lane even though it's an army topic. And that's where we can work together to leverage the funding for the research. That would be for army, but at a higher level. It's across the Chembio arena. And that's how we we support the other agencies and the other services. On average, we do about five to eight small business innovation research topics annually. And the small business technology transfer is about one every other year. There's different pools of money, different funding. It's a percentage taken out of a larger DoD taxable to the DoD firms who have an R and D investment. And then that gets divvied up between the agencies and we're a smaller program, but that's about the number that we can fund annually and semi annually. We work in the technology readiness level between TRL 3 and 5. So we don't fund basic research. But we're right there with phase one where it is the proof of concept. Phase two is we actually want you to start building the technology. And then from phase two to phase three is where we hope you would be able to leverage finding a larger business or another larger funding pool that's non CBer to do the phase three, which is the goal that's getting the product or the technology to commercialization to get it actually out to the war fighter or to the individual. Phase one, it's about six months. At month five, you can submit for a phase two proposal. We do not do direct to phase two, but if you have been awarded a phase one contract, you're automatically allowed to submit for a Phase ii. Our contracts are far based, so that is federal acquisition regulation. So we are held to the regulations of federal acquisitions. They are also firm fixed price so that when we agree to a contract amount, that'll be the amount for the Phase one. So the firms who are awarded a phase one, their phase two has to still be reviewed as if the phase ones were submitted and the proposal reviewed. But about 50% do get selected. 50% or more get selected for a phase II. Our technology areas of interest, again, it stays within that Chembio lane. Medical science and technologies would be vaccines, pre treatments, biological countermeasures. That's also a big one where perhaps therapeutics that are primarily targeting pathogens such as anthrax or botulism, or even more of the berkhold areas. If the warfighter might be going into an area that they could be exposed to this we look for either prophylactics or treatments. Also chemical countermeasures I mentioned earlier, perhaps a fabric where the wearer would be protected. Digital battle space. So modeling, simulation, data fusion, even disease surveillance if it falls within chemical biological defense. We've also funded surveillance of diseases in say animal research where we can possibly track the threat. Also physical science and technology, so detection or protection. We've worked with wearable technology that could alert the warfighter that they are possibly having physiological symptoms of illness before any known signs or symptoms develop. So that's just an example of where our focus tends to be. So even though it's within the Chembio lane, it's actually really broad. What we do look for and how we do fund small business businesses and their technology.
