Non- Dilutive AgeTech Funding From the AI/Tech + Aging A2 Collective!

Welcome Stephen. 

Hi Keren. Nice to meet you. I’ve read your book and it’s awesome. 

Thank you. It’s nice to have you here.

Stephen I’m sure everyone is incredibly curious to know what exactly is the AI/tech + aging, A2 collective and what is this award that people can apply to ? Well the, A2 collective stands for the AI tech and aging collective and we represent essentially the national Institute on Aging’s artificial intelligence, technology, collaboratories, or research and aging program aging, research’s called AITC. You know, the NIH and the government loves to have their acronyms and be as descriptive as possible because there’s so many different programs, but we simplified it to just the, A2 collective and, and, you know, the overall mission of the, of the program is to empower innovation and AI and aging.

And we’re really dedicated to helping Americans. Live longer healthier lives with the application of artificial intelligence and emerging technology and the A2 collective hosts, the A2 pilot awards, which is on an annual basis. We’re, we’re having our second installment right now. It’s applications are due August 15th, and essentially the AITC program has earmarked about $40 million over the next five years to fund these technology based pilot demonstration projects. So and these are kind of. You could, you might say precede types of technology. They have a prototype it’s kind of ready to go.

It’s ready to test. We’re not talking about the big study but we’re looking for the things that are going to move the needle the next, you know, two to five years not just purely. Academic research projects, but there are that’s also a valid purpose. We have a very broad mandate.

So anyway, so the A2 collective, we all, we have A2 pilot awards, which is on annual basis and the, A2 collective is made up. Of course, The NIA there are three research housed out of John Hopkins. University of Pennsylvania and the university of Massachusetts at Amherst and of university of Massachusetts Amherst.

It’s actually a co collection of, of five entities there, but essentially there’s three research laboratories and also a coordinating center run by Rosalie associates. And so that makes up the A2 collective, we host the A2 pilot words and we’re, you know, very excited to kind of help the industry along to do our part, to inspire innovation, using AI technologies in aging and especially also Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia.

Brilliant. So what was the origin of this award? What made, the NIA decide to run a program specifically for AI in aging? 

Well you know, I think this is a vision of, NIA and specifically Partha and Marcel (Salive). And I think, think of this as their moonshot, and the model was Y Combinator was kind of a, an inspirational point.

You know, how can we use some of these Y Combinator types of the ethos, I guess, and infuse that in the NIA. And and so, we’re probably going to fund over next five years because each project $ 40 million total for pilot projects, about 8 million per year average pilot project.

You know, $150,000 or so. So we could be funding, you know, potentially 200 pilot projects over five years. So from there if we, we have an eye towards, you know commercialization and a translational impact in the next two, as, as we’re selecting them, that that’s something that could hopefully have a positive impact.

On the status of you know, aging and dementia research in the US. And that’s what we hope to do is make that impact with this program. And so that’s kind of the, the origin story of how this program from, as, as told by, as told to me by the program officer it’s really quite an inspiring thing.

That’s kind of what I was so attracted to. I guess joined this A2 collective you know, my origin story is that I partnered up with Dr. Rose Lee who is a former NIA branch chief. And she had told me about this you know, RFP for a coordinating center. And so I partnered with her and Rosalie associates, which is a a very established firm does a lot of great work related to coordination meetings, program management, largely related to NIH and NIA and health related things.

And I helped her on the kind of Silicon valley portion of the grandpa proposal. And, I was pleased that we got the grant, it’s really exciting. It’s really inspiring. You know, you have two areas that are mega trends over the next. 10 20 years, you have number one hand technology and especially artificial intelligence and machine learning, which is gonna dominate every aspect of our life. But then you have obviously you know aging and dementia Alzheimer’s disease, which are two of the, the biggest you know both issues, but also market opportunities.

In the next 10 years as your book kind of details out. And so I thought, wow, this is, this is a good thing to invest in for the next so many years. And ingratiate myself in the industry. Everybody’s been so welcoming, welcoming like yourself and people like Mary Furlong and Steve Ewell. And I guess, you know, all these people and it’s been great to work with everybody from, for myself, I come from more of the Silicon valley world.

And as I look at this, there is a shortage of AI engineers that can really do serious research work globally. They’re all being hired by, Baidu and Google and Amazon. They’re probably funding research fellowships. And then the, the other portion of the guys are of our best and brightest are focusing on delivering TikTok videos.

And so I don’t think they realize how big of a market opportunity, how big of an impact they can make on our US healthcare system kind of from a social impact level that and so that’s kind of my personal agenda is to get some of these people in venture and tech to allocate and take more bets in aging in Alzheimer’s disease because in the next 10 years, it’s going to be a big problem and it’s gonna be a great market opportunity.

Absolutely. There is definitely a shortage of AI engineers 

oh, I should clarify that we purposely called it AI and tech AI slash tech, because your project doesn’t have to have AI yet probably machine learning or, or it doesn’t necessarily even need that.

It could be emerging. As well too. So we wanted, there’s a purposely broad mandate for this program. I think it’s, we’re letting a thousand flowers bloom. We wanna see, we don’t wanna close off anything in terms of the pilot projects that we will sponsor. Interesting. So let’s, let’s dive into that.

So what would be the ideal candidate profile for this program? That’s that’s that’s a great question. So we had our very first pilot awards if you recall just six months ago.

so, and we’re still digesting that we have, I think 20 to 25 conditional awardee that have not been announced yet. We kind of caught a different cycle. And so we hope to announce that probably in September, October. And for this year for, this August pilot awards, this is for funding by spring of 2023.

So it won’t take as long as we did for the first one. And so some of the what I can say about some of the projects that were funded. We had a lot for what I could see. There was a lot in the typical areas of physical frailty and, and cognitive decline, social isolation, multimorbidity, then we had something related to delirium and cataracts, medication management is an area. They, a lot of them were using off the shelf sensor technologies some mature technologies. There was thermal imaging for passive monitoring. Obviously there’s lots of AI algorithms driven types of technologies. And I would say that among the split this particular program, there’s actually two separate buckets.

So each of the three collaboratories have one bucket, but it’s actually split between healthy aging and ADRD. And so once you’re either in one of those two buckets some, sometimes there’s hybrid, but it’s U usually there’s a choice there. And you know, among the awardees, I’d say about 60% had something to do with ADRD actually.

So we actually had quite a bit of Alzheimer’s and dementia related. There’s also more money attributed towards, Alzheimer’s as well too. And then about 36% was purely healthy aging. So that can give you a little sense of that, but that’s not to say that these categories will be this split next year.

It really depends on, on what the research collaboratories the AITCS get in. And I’m sure they’ll just pick the, the strongest teams and pilot project proposals.

So what is the selection process like? 

Well, it’s it’s application process. And so in this second year which is due August 15th it’s actually a two step process. So what’s due in August 15th is what we call a round one prelim application. It’s essentially for academic speak an LOI.

I think the actual application format is about two pages along with some other supporting materials. And so you’ll have to declare a budget number that you’re requesting. Obviously you have to have a topic and you want to cover kind of the the scientific merit, a light project plan who’s involved. What’s the problem. How big of a problem is is there any commercial or translational or clinical, you know, impact? And so from there we’ll make a decision in September and then by October we’ll we will invite. From that pool of round one for round two, who will submit a full application that will be much more involved, that will include a full budget with budget justification and a variety of other areas.

And of course, there’ll be some interviews, you know, in between that as well, too. So generally we have both academics and startups applying some even larger companies applying. And so yeah, everybody goes through the same process. They are reviewed, they have to choose one of three research laboratories, John Hopkins, Penn, or mass.

And then that colaboratory will assign a multidisciplinary team to review it. They, they generally go by the ni NIH score. So I always tell the, at least the startups you know, a big a component of this is scientific merit, you know, is the outcome that you’re researching for your pilot project is that gonna advance the science, can you contextualize it with the prior research, does the actual pilot project plan does it have scientific rigor? And then of course there’s the commercial translational clinical need putting in context there. And you know, the team, as well too.

Got it. So it’s basically a startup or a, a researcher it could also be an academic that has any type of technology doesn’t necessarily have to be fancy AI. You could be generating a data set. 

As an example and obviously it’s all about data these days. So, you know, without labeled data, then you know, I think everyone would like to acquire access to label data so they can do other research. We’re not asking, oh, by the way, I should mention that we’re not asking any of the pilot project awardees to share any IP per se or there’s no initial IP, though. It may differ based upon the university and what resources you use with each collaborator, but you should talk to them about that. Also it’s zero equity it’s non-dilutive in terms of the funding that may be a data sharing arrangement such as anonymized labeled data from the research and then, you know the, each research collaborator has a wealth of, I mean, these are the leading experts in their field you know, from medicine to geriatrics, to computer science.

So there’s a huge benefit to working with these research collaboratories and they don’t wanna just write a check. They want to help these pilot project, they want to advance and I want to help. I wanna, I, I want these pilot projects to become a startup and then eventually raise funding and have it go into payers like Humana, you know, down the road.

So we’d like to see. Deployed in the next couple years some of these seedlings, I guess. And so, so that part is exciting. It is exciting generating new scientific knowledge that could potentially tackle some of the challenges of aging. And really, like you said, move the needle.

So startups can get up to $200,000 of non-dilutive funding, is that right? 

Yes. And that’s not including that’s direct cost and I would advise that if they look to apply you always wanna over ask, I guess, but don’t over ask too much because when you get to the application process for the NIA, you’re gonna have to justify every line items.

And a lot of these research collaboratives actually know how much things cost. But then again, if you’re a funded startup, maybe you could subsidize the cost as well, too. I think the association is more important because you’re having your technology being validated, validated by the leading researchers in this field.

And I think that goes a long way because eventually all health tech type of tech and med tech type of technologies have to go through a rigorous validation process you know, called the FDA or so there are clinical trials, all that type of stuff. So I think it’s, it’s good to, it’s a good thing to involve. I mean, my pitch to health tech and med. Start there. There’s actually quite a few health tech, med tech startups that are well funded that have mature technology and IP. And I’m talking to a number of them right now that are interested in this program because they, they may be working on other areas, pediatrics or something, but they could simply.

Do an application towards aging or dementia. And so they could retrofit their, so I’m talking to one particular start that has a pediatric wearable device. And now is looking to do an aging or dementia type of application. So I think there’s a lot of examples like that where they don’t necessarily have to be brand new technology.

But you know, generally, and there’s also a lot of academics that are doing. Great work in other areas not necessarily related to aging or dementia that it may actually apply to aging. One particular one that I talked to was wanting to do user experience and he actually came from the toddler space user experience, but actually there’s some similarities there.

Being the best buy geek squad for my parents on setting up all their iPads. A lot of the existing technologies. Right now, and apps and devices are, as covered in your book are not geared for senior citizens. There’s not enough research. They just assume that you know how to do it.

You know? I’m constantly being called to my parents’ house. every day becomes their iPad is on the Fritz or they didn’t sync this or that. So it it’s quite it’s quite, intimidating

So from the time during spring 2023, that grantees are awarded their, their grant. How much time is there to run a pilot, write a paper, publish it. What’s the process like from. Well, I don’t know if you need to write a paper, but I think we do hope a paper comes out of it.

You know, generally there’s probably gonna be an academic involved at least quoting the existing research or putting, contextualizing everything. But that’s a very good question because these are meant to be fairly quick pilot studies. We expect that the funds get deployed within a year and the project actually finishes it within a year.

There could be case by case things where it may justify going beyond that. And it, there may be, it could be case by case where some of the research, the ATCs may actually do follow on funding, but but the purposes of of the of this grant is one year. These could have the sizes of these studies, you know, it could be 1500 subjects basically.

So these are relatively small. Obviously the more that you can do where it is, you know, statistically significant the better, but these are relatively small fairly quick, I guess, relatively inexpensive projects because we’re kind of in this these are pilots, right? We, we wanna see what flies.

So is there anything else that we didn’t discuss and you think people applying whether they’re entrepreneurs or researchers should know? I think academic researchers will be, you know, probably, a good portion of our applicants and awardees. But really more of the messages I think, to non academics, which we’re really trying to reach out to. They’re, they’re also an important group is You know, I think you’re gonna link the webinar that we had.

Yeah, please definitely, you know, watch that webinar and, and what the PIs of the respective laboratories are looking for. But the, the one area that I get a lot of questions on is, or I encourage is that when it actually goes to the application, I think scientific merit is a big portion. They are scientists first and foremost.

And so this is not necessarily for product development of your, of your application, right? So you have to put in, you have to contextualize it in What are you contributing to the aging and dementia research field? What are the existing research and how does this improve upon it?

I guess important area that is a score for the NIH on EV probably every NIH grant application I’m learning. So, so usually it helps to probably involve an academic to partner with on this. And I think it just in general health tech and med tech requires that academic reference anyways, right?

Absolutely. And I’m happy to try to answer any questions. We have a broad mandate and so I would just encourage you to apply the application is only. A couple pages long. And I’m told that the research laboratories will give light feedback on your application. They are, some of them are actually holding posting office hours to discuss your application. And then we’re having this every year.

And so if you don’t get it this time, improve your application for next time, we have years, three, four, and five. And you know, if you get selected and run a pilot program with us, it will make you more competitive for the much larger funding of the NIA SBIR grants. So think of us as the farm system for the SBIR grants that give a million dollars for research and you can do clinical trials and all that stuff.

And so Yeah. So, you know I just encourage you to research, what the AITCS have. I can tell you that every AITC collaborator is slightly different on what they are focused on based upon, I would say the backgrounds of the PIs, as well as the resources. And so, you know, for example John Hopkins is out of the school of medicine and Penn is out of the school of nursing. Massachusetts has a focus on home and sensor technology. So, you know, everybody’s slightly different that they all can do everything. I guess they all have, you know, all the resources, the wealth of resources you know, so any one of them would be phenomenal to partner with on your pilot project.

Sounds like a wonderful, wonderful program. Stephen, I wanna thank you for joining me today and I wanna thank you for running this program too, because it sounds like it really bridges a, a gap in funding. Like you said, it could be a stepping stone for the larger SBIR grants that require more resources from the company to run a huge clinical trial.

So I’m incredibly excited about this. It’s great that it’s a five year program. And like you said, people who don’t get it this year can try again next year. And if there are any other questions, please, please go to the AI collective’s website www.a2collective.ai. All the information you need is right there, including the webinar.

Thank you for time and allowing me to share this with your community and thank you for what you do for this space as well too.

Thank you, Stephen. I appreciate it.