[Click here to download (in .xlsx format) the raw data presented in this post. -IH]
In my initial post dealing with Texas-based recipients of HHS-sponsored SBIR grants*, I concentrated on the amount of funding that individual companies, as well as individual cities, were capturing through this federal grant mechanism. This time, I wanted to gain an understanding of the types of companies within the Texas biomedical industry that were being funded by the SBIR program. In order to do this, I read the abstracts of individual HHS-funded SBIR projects being pursued by each company and then manually assigned each company to one of six categories**: 1) Small Molecules/Biologicals, 2) Molecular Diagnostics, 3) Medical Devices - Diagnostic, 4) Medical Devices - Therapeutic, 5) Computation/Software, and 6) Other/Multiple Categories. As with my previous post, I looked at grants awarded between 2008 and 2012. The spreadsheet below (scrollable) lists each company, its assigned category, and a link for the company's profile page within the SBIR database. (To view the spreadsheet as a separate page, click here.)
In my initial post dealing with Texas-based recipients of HHS-sponsored SBIR grants*, I concentrated on the amount of funding that individual companies, as well as individual cities, were capturing through this federal grant mechanism. This time, I wanted to gain an understanding of the types of companies within the Texas biomedical industry that were being funded by the SBIR program. In order to do this, I read the abstracts of individual HHS-funded SBIR projects being pursued by each company and then manually assigned each company to one of six categories**: 1) Small Molecules/Biologicals, 2) Molecular Diagnostics, 3) Medical Devices - Diagnostic, 4) Medical Devices - Therapeutic, 5) Computation/Software, and 6) Other/Multiple Categories. As with my previous post, I looked at grants awarded between 2008 and 2012. The spreadsheet below (scrollable) lists each company, its assigned category, and a link for the company's profile page within the SBIR database. (To view the spreadsheet as a separate page, click here.)
The number of companies assigned to each category is shown below:
(Click here to view as a separate spreadsheet.)
As a bench biologist, I was excited to find that "Small Molecules/Biologicals" constituted by far the largest category, with more than a third (35%) of the companies being assigned to it. Also, I was surprised by the relatively large number of companies I was forced to classify as "Other/Multiple Categories." There were quite a few companies that either worked in multiple disciplines or in areas that didn't neatly fit into any of the categories.
Did certain categories of companies cluster within certain metropolitan areas? To find out, I mapped out the companies according to their addresses, color-coded by category (courtesy of BatchGeo.com). At least by visual inspection, I really couldn't discern much geographical clustering by category:
(Click here to view the map in a separate screen. To download the data represented in this map as a spreadsheet (.xlsx), click here.)
As an alternate method of analysis I generated a spreadsheet that shows the tally for each category within each metropolitan area:
This turned out to be a bit more informative. First and foremost, the overall dominance of Houston stands out, as it leads the pack in four out of six categories: "Small Molecules/Biologicals," "Other/Multiple Categories," and both "Medical Device" categories. However, this analysis also revealed that: 1) Austin has the greatest number of HHS-sponsored SBIR awardees working in Molecular Diagnostics, and 2) Dallas has the greatest number of HHS-sponsored SBIR awardees working in Computation/Software.
- Isamu Hartman, PhD
P.S. I encourage everyone to take a look at the company profile pages within the SBIR database (see links within the top spreadsheet of this post). It provides a comprehensive list of all SBIR grants the company has received, together with links for detailed abstracts of the projects funded by each grant. It is an incredibly rich source of information on the R&D activities of these companies, at times even more informative than the companies' own websites.
* HHS = Department of Health and Human Services, which is the administrative home of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As discussed in my initial post on this topic, I limited my analysis to SBIR grants sponsored by HHS because doing so offered a straightforward way to look specifically at SBIR grants made to companies working within the biomedical sector.
** Assigning each company to a specific category was at times not simple and required quite a bit of subjective judgement on my part. To maintain consistency I categorized all companies based on the nature of HHS-funded SBIR projects they had been awarded between 2008 and 2012 (that is to say, I didn't necessarily take into account a company's self-description on its own corporate website). If you feel that my categorization of any particular company is off-target, please let me know in the comments!
One sub-sector you might want to check is Drug Delivery. Would that perhaps help resolve some of the companies in the other/multiple category?
ReplyDeleteIt very well may - I'll definitely take a look at it. One category I did consider making was that of companies developing contrast agents for various medical imaging techniques - I'll need to check again, but I think there are three such companies within the "Other/Multiple Categories" group.
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