Innovation Works marks 10 years of funding local startups, creating jobs
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Susan Catalano, of Cognition Therapeutics, Inc., at the 10th anniversary of Innovation Works. -
Rich Lunak, CEO of Innovation Works, talks at the 10th anniversary of Innovation Works. -
Willie Taylor, Regional Director of the Philadelphia office of the US Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration, talks at the 10th anniversary of Innovation Works.
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Willie Taylor looked over the factory floor at McKesson Automation in Cranberry where 300 inventors, entrepreneurs, financiers and those who support them were sitting in folding chairs.
Mr. Taylor, the regional director of the U.S. Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration, helps distribute money to promising companies.
Which explained why everyone had dollar signs in their eyes as they listened to him tell the entrepreneurs gathered for the Innovation Works 10th annual community meeting that they were, in fact, the most important people in the room.
"Without your ideas, we're just a federal government holding money," he said.
Susan Catalano, chief scientific officer for Cognition Therapeutics, was one of those people in the room with an idea.
She is working to develop a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease, and two years into her research she estimates she is about a year away from asking for Federal Drug Administration approval for testing.
Drug development is expensive. So far South Side-based Cognition Therapeutics has received $300,000 from Innovation Works, $200,000 from the federal government in stimulus money, $700,000 from the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse (all of those sources of public money) and another $1.5 million from a private investment source.
When she thinks about how much money has gone into her lab -- which employs her and another full-time worker plus two part-time people -- Ms. Catalano concedes it is a bit mind-boggling.
She also has received other help from the public sector, including what she calls "C-level" support from Innovation Works -- or the sort of executive-level guidance she needed.
Innovation Works, a publicly funded early-stage venture fund focused on economic development, has invested $48 million of state money into startup companies during that time.
First Published May 2, 2010 12:00 am
