BIO VIEW FROM HERE: Long Island

by Steve Levy, Suffolk County Executive and Anil Dhundale, PhD, Executive Director, Long Island High Technology Incubator at
Stony Brook University

A basic tenet of technology-based economic development is that the research institute is the driver. Basic research discoveries create technologies with potential to generate commercial products. The role of government is to offer support, along with the research institutes, to nurture the startup companies that come out of the lab, through the business incubators, and then mature in the commercial sector. Some regions are not blessed with a research institute to spark that kind of growth – but in Suffolk County we have an abundance of resources.

The county is home to Stony Brook University, which is home to two NYS Centers of Advanced Technology, in Biotechnology and Sensors, the Center of Excellence in Wireless Information Technology (CEWIT), the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center (AERTC) which is under construction, and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Suffolk is also home to business incubators, including the Long Island High Technology Incubator, Stony Brook’s Software, CEWIT, AERTC, and Calverton incubators, and a bioscience park for later stage biotech companies, the Broad Hollow Bioscience Park in Farmingdale. Within shouting distance of Suffolk County’s border is the internationally renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. With these resources and the research dollars they garner in we ought to be off the charts with bioscience companies.

Through efforts of Joe Scaduto, at the Center for Biotechnology at Stony Brook University, and Lisa Broughton, Suffolk County’s Bio/High Technology Development Specialist, we sought to establish a new dynamic that would enable us to maximize our role in supporting our biotech sector. We learned the federal Small Business Innovation Research grant program has been America’s largest venture capital-type program for the last 20 years, but that the program flies under the radar for many entrepreneurs.

Many of our companies have been successful in winning these grants over the years, but many have not simply because they were unaware or didn’t know where to start. Still others are so busy running their business they don’t pop their heads up to find out that the work they are doing – inventing a new process, or medicine or tool – is exactly what the federal government is awarding companies to do through these grants.

Because the federal government does not ask for payback or equity, SBIR grants are a rich source of nondiluting revenue. For the region, it's a great way to bring back some of the billions that Long Islanders contribute when they pay their federal taxes. But the grants are competitive and companies often need to partner with an engineer or scientist at one of our research institutes to get this done. Our program sought to increase that critical access to our university researchers for potential collaboration. Just as important, researchers need to be educated about technology-based businesses, and to be informed how the SBIR program can work to fund their startup companies.

We established a pilot education program, the SBIR Outreach Program, with a goal to increase the number of SBIR awards coming into Suffolk County; to bring awareness to local companies of the SBIR program and to help them align themselves with the support we have from our research institutes.

Proof of the program’s success is evident through a company like ChemMaster International, a Stony Brook University faculty-based medicinal chemistry company. Established in 1994 by Drs. Francis Johnson and Ramesh Gupta, it has been very successful over the years. Through the SBIR Outreach Program, they were encouraged to make an application to test a novel anti-cancer therapeutic, discovered by Stony Brook Distinguished Professor Iwao Ojima in collaboration with Prof. Ralph Bernacke at Roswell Park in Buffalo. The goal to test this in animal studies was a prelude to human clinical trials. They applied in December, 2007 and were awarded their first phase 1 SBIR grant for $100,000 this fall. If successful with this early stage work they will be eligible for a phase 2 grant that could bring up to $1,000,000 of funding to advance a potential new anti-cancer drug.

But the success of our pilot SBIR Outreach Program is not based on the immediate gratification of seeing a company make a successful application. Throughout the one-year program our economic development staff identified dozens of companies from all sectors, including the biotechnology sector, as potential candidates for SBIR grants.

Information events we held as part of the program were well-attended. In March we held the 2008 Long Island Regional SBIR Workshop at Stony Brook, which attracted participants from as far away as Buffalo, Rochester, and New Jersey. And in August we sponsored the 2008 Long Island SBIR Summer Workshop at the Broad Hollow Bioscience Park in Farmingdale, which was hosted by OSI Pharmaceuticals and showcased one of the regions real biotech gems – the Broad Hollow Bioscience Park itself.

We leveraged the NYSTAR SBIR Outreach Support program by keeping in close contact with our New York State Regional SBIR Specialist, Franklin Madison. He outlined the services he provides to companies at both events and we were able to make new referrals to him throughout the year. His specialty is in SBIR grants and he was one of many others in economic development based in our region that contributed at these workshops.

While the pilot program is ending, the work of SBIR – and its partner program STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) – outreach by Suffolk County and Stony Brook University will continue. Important networks and channels of communication have been established throughout the one-year program that will continue be utilized by our economic development staff when it comes across an innovative company. There is a new awareness of the opportunity that our incubators present, and much cross-pollination among laboratories, other research institutes and economic developers throughout the Long Island region. Through collaborative efforts at the workshops and company meetings, there is a greater awareness of Suffolk’s suite of economic development and workforce development programs that will continue to build our technology-based economy—an opportunity to bring, and to keep, jobs on Long Island.