Reuters
The federal government is offering billions of dollars in grants to promote US innovation in the fight against the coronavirus.
- There are many stories of innovation emerging during the coronavirus pandemic, like Cisco's use of 3D printing to make face shields for healthcare workers.
- The federal government is trying to enhance those efforts and is offering billions of dollars in grants across different agencies.
- The funding is available to companies, startups, and even individual researchers - and awards range from the low thousands of dollars to $10 million.
- The scope is also very broad. There are funding opportunities available for everything from the development of wearable health sensors to no-contact research into whether remote stress management techniques help with depression.
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Across the corporate landscape, there are many examples of how big-name corporations are using advanced technology in the fight against the coronavirus.
Companies like IBM and D-Wave are offering free, remote access to their quantum computers. Others like Cisco are using 3D printing technology to make face shields across the globe. And hospitals that underwent digital overhauls are already employing their new tools to enhance their response capabilities.
These are examples of the kind of innovation the federal government is promoting during this outbreak - and not just from the larger players.
Across agencies like the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, billions of dollars of funding are available to small businesses, startups, and individual researchers to pursue more technologically advanced tools to fight the coronavirus.
The grants focus on everything from vaccine development to quantum science-based solutions that aim to change our understanding of modern scientific problems. Some of this technology may seem more science fiction at this point than grounded in reality.
"America's vibrant innovation ecosystem has always brought outside-the-box ideas and technologies to the forefront to address great challenges," US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios said in a Tuesday statement. "The Trump Administration is committed to leveraging our country's brilliant start-ups, entrepreneurs, and technologists in the fight against COVID-19."
Read on to see the grants currently available.
The National Institutes of Health: $1.78 billion
The NIH's funding is focused in several different areas, including vaccine and test development.
Among the specific products the agency is seeking applications for are home-based diagnostic tests, wearable health monitors, and artificial intelligence-backed systems to help scan X-rays and other data sources for potential infections.
The NIH is also supporting no-contact research projects examining how effective remote stress management techniques - such as virtual yoga or hypnosis - are in helping at-risk populations like coronavirus patients manage anxiety and depression.
While the NIH has adjusted its application deadline to May 1, it has also noted the need for urgency in submissions.
"This rapidly evolving situation also creates multiple challenges for conducting review, and the timeline for getting review outcomes to councils (so that funding can occur) can only be delayed so long," the agency wrote.
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority: $1.69 billion
BARDA is the federal department tasked with developing and stockpiling medical countermeasures for bioterrorism threats.
The agency invests in private-sector efforts to research vaccines, diagnostic testing and other treatments. And it's now halting all other grants and focusing only on those that support the federal coronavirus response.
Among the areas it is seeking submissions on are diagnostic development, research into treatments that aid in lung repair, and ventilators.
BARDA, for example, expanded an ongoing, $1 billion partnership with Johnson & Johnson, as the pharmaceutical giants plans to begin human trials of a potential vaccine in September.
More than a dozen other drugmakers are also rushing to begin clinical trials.
The National Science Foundation: Grants up to $200,000
The NSF is viewed as the non-clinical counterpart to the NIH.
The $8.3 billion agency funds roughly 24% of all federal research at US academic institutions. And during the coronavirus, the agency is shifting its focus to data-driven programs that can help monitor and anticipate the outbreak.
While the NSF is encouraging researchers to capitalize on existing grant offers, it is touting a program that allows the department to quickly deploy yearlong grants up to $200,000.
The agency is also running a separate grant program to provide funding to small businesses that use AI, blockchain, and other advanced tech to help the US respond to the pandemic.
Department of Defense's Basic Research Office: Grants up to $100,000
Social media users have turned to Sir Issac Newton as inspiration during the era of social distancing.
The famed inventor used the wide shutdown of facilities during the Great Plague of London to advance much of his work on gravity, calculus, and other topics.
And the Department of Defense is no different.
Single researchers or teams of two can apply for the "Newton Award for Transformative Ideas."
The grant encourages the development of more out-of-the-box solutions to the pandemic - including quantum science-based tools that "present disruptive ways of thinking about fundamental scientific problems."
"The objective of this program is to generate proposals that are equally novel and pioneering. Therefore, this [grant] should be viewed as an opportunity to propose basic research that falls outside the bounds of traditional proposals," the department's research office wrote.
Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): Grants up to $10 million
NIST is tasked with providing scientific and technical guidance on issues like data privacy or cybersecurity that, while not required, are used by many companies as basic frameworks for their own efforts.
The new, coronavirus-specific grants from the department rely on funds included in the $2 trillion stimulus package that President Trump signed into law last month.
The department is seeking proposals on areas ranging from the development of medical countermeasures for the coronavirus to bringing more drug supply chains back to the US.
Among the examples cited by NIST are scaling up production of wearable medical detection equipment, switching production lines to advanced manufacturing techniques, and training programs to teach workers how to use the new tools.
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