The Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) provides funding to advance sciences, promote health, and strengthen Washington State’s economy. Currently, LSDF is offering two different types of grants for both for-profit and non-profit organizations located in Washington State.
The award program “Proof of Concept Grants” is open to both non-profit and for-profit entities with the maximum award of $250,000. These grants are meant to reduce the risk of commercialization for potential new products. The goal is to support highly targeted research and development activities and then be able to commercialize these products but only to find that federal funds are not available. At the same time, these potential tools and products under development are probably considered too risky for private investment.
LSDF funded work does not have to result in a market ready commercial product by the end of the grant term, but the proposals must demonstrate potential for creating and retaining jobs in Washington state.
The funding will go to ideas or products that will:
· Develop tools with the potential to lead to breakthroughs in health-related research
· Provide for products to use to diagnose, treat, prevent, or manage disease
· Better manage healthcare delivery environments and systems
· Promote healthy patient behaviors and patient compliance with care provider’s recommendations
· Better integrate care providers, patients, and healthcare systems
· Accomplish any of the above at a lower cost with equal or better patient outcomes
The second award program titled “2012-2013 Opportunity Grants” has the maximum award of $1,400,000 to use to significantly leverage LSDF dollars against money from other sources. Up to $7,000,000 will be available for funding through June 2013.
For both grant programs, all applicants must submit a pre-proposal to be considered and both grant program are accepting year round applications. The Request for Proposal was released August 9th, with proposals due quarterly.
Go to www.lsdfa.org/documents/pdfs/LSDF_2012-2012_Granting_Programs_RFP.pdf to view the RFP.
