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Amber Lucas’s biotech company has been years in the making. The idea for it began when she was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she worked with her advisor to develop new sample preparation tools for biomarker and drug discovery. She then sought training in entrepreneurship skills and did market research to determine whether there would be interest in the technology. It turned out, there was. So last June, she and her graduate advisor applied for a $225,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation grant to seed a startup around the proteome purification technology. In early December, they found out the application had been successful, and began planning the launch of their company.
What they hadn’t planned for was the eventuality that the US government would partially shut down, leaving them with no access to the funds they need to get ...
