Great. JUST FREAKING GREAT

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Now the NIH puts out some token fucking bullshit funding opps for small businesses from the ARRA funds. And it just screws things up.

First there's this peach of an opportunity where $5 million is set aside for 20-25 Phase Is worth 200K for one yr each. AWESOME! You are just too freaking kind!

And then there's this monstrosity: $35 million set aside for at least 10 awards (woo-freacking-hoo!)--award limit 1 million/yr for 3 yrs---basically for 'bridging' the gap from science to market that any company can apply for! There's the token bullshit about 'preference will be given to Cos with fewer than 500 employees' etc etc blah blah. but freaking COME ON! Yeah, a 3-5 person company that kicks ass is really gonna stand a chance against a 250 person, venture funded enterprise that can assign 25 people to the task of writing the 3 million dollar grant based on their stuff. Lemme see, 40% of the score goes to Team and Facilities etc....so the company of BSD from MRU gets spotted a healthy 40% on the score. Besides, a cursory glance at the bullet points shows quite a bit of advanced applied stuff --- not much of immediate-basic translational work is represented.
There's nothing wrong with bigger Cos getting money, BTW, except that the ones of that size that show promise have healthy funding streams to begin with. Way to go all repub and see that the rich get richer (not surprising---I bet big biotech pharma dollars lobbied this shit up).

So the biotech "small biz" community gets a whopping $40 million, 0.4% of the ARRA NIH money (oooohh, you are too generous, sire), much of which goes to approx a dozen awards---that good small biotechs cannot compete for in reality .

In return, my guess is that all reasonably competitive RC1s and RC2s from biotech start-ups will get trashed in review---"hey, the business guys get their own set-aside, let them compete there...." I figure it was a lot of lobbying from the business community that got this set-aside---but not to help small business biotechs really, cos there's a few one-year-Phase Is (big fucking deal) and a handful of big ticket awards that even good start-ups cannot realistically compete for. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

DAMMIT, I AM SO FREAKING MAD. We had a pretty competitive proposal in with the general stream, and I was happy to take my chances. In my deluded state, I guess, I was even feeling a bit positive about it. The last thing we needed was a stupid meaningless set-aside that could nevertheless influence reviewers to bag it sayin "Fuck em. They can get some of the small business pie".....

Now, I am almost kicking myself for putting in all that time. Dammit. At least if they'd announced this before I turned in the proposal I'd have had a chance to argue the proposal in this light. Dammit. Dammit. Freaking dammit.

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