Dr. Richard Burns and his children, Andrew and Kira, developed a product to help those who have difficulty walking. They are among the winners of this year’s Startup Challenge, a new program at the National Institute on Aging that mentors and helps fund entrepreneurs who want to improve the lives of older adults. Photo courtesy of Kira Burns

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What if you had a bright idea for a gadget that could help older adults? How would you turn that idea into reality?

Six years ago, Pam Cacchione, a Philadelphia nurse, had such an idea. Her brother, who lives in Maryland, had developed heart failure, which caused his legs to swell. She wanted to help him but was too far away to check on him personally.

“I resorted to looking at his sock rings,” she said; that is, the rings his socks left on his swollen legs. “I blurted out, ‘You need heart-failure monitoring socks!’”

Her colleagues urged her to invent those socks, so Cacchione came up with a few prototypes and this February won $60,000 from the Startup Challenge, a new program at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Bethesda, Maryland.

“These socks are going to help families manage their loved one’s heart failure at home and notice if they’re getting worse or getting better,” said Cacchione, professor of Geropsychiatric Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

Although her invention has taken years to develop and still needs further testing, “it’s been really exciting and such a huge learning curve,” Cacchione said of the NIA program.

A government Shark Tank

The Startup Challenge helps many new businesses with that learning curve. Launched two years ago, innovators from all types of backgrounds — nurses, bankers, researchers — are welcome to apply.

NIA chooses 20 applicants each year to participate in a five-month “accelerator” — an educational program providing 40 training sessions and a three-day in-person “boot camp” conference. After five months, NIA selects six winners to each win a $60,000 cash prize.

The funding has already helped put a fall-detection device in Best Buy stores and has assisted dozens of other entrepreneurs.

“It’s not something that you see every day — a government office like ours to be able to develop a de novo program that immediately is having impact,” said Todd Haim, Ph.D., the director of NIA’s Office of Strategic Extramural Programs, which oversees the Startup Challenge and Accelerator.

The program isn’t exactly “Shark Tank,” but it bears some resemblance to the reality TV series. For instance, each innovator’s pitch video, filmed at the beginning and again at the end of the program, is “very similar to what you see on ‘Shark Tank,’” Haim said.

But instead of the kitchen sponges and gourmet popcorn vying for funding on “Shark Tank,” these inventions must be related to improving the health of older adults.

Recent winner Richard Burns, his son, Andrew, and his daughter, Kira, worked together to invent a walker with a harness to help support a person’s body weight. Richard was inspired to devise the technology years ago, when he watched his grandmother struggle to walk.

“I was trying to dream something up that would take the weight off her knee joints and make it less painful,” Burns said.

With that idea, the Burns family co-founded a company, Gravitrex. They heard about the Startup Challenge, applied, and were selected to participate in July 2023.

For the next five months, they attended virtual training sessions, met with mentors and advisors, and gathered with their fellow entrepreneurs at a three-day conference.

“We really were given a lot of information on how to prepare for and succeed in the world of entrepreneurship,” Kira Burns said.

“We had a lot of homework. We had to put in a lot to get a lot out of the program, and that was key.”

Demystifying federal grants

The Startup Challenge was the brainchild of Joy Toliver, a program coordinator in Haim’s office. Toliver recognized that few Americans know the NIA awards nearly $150 million in funding each year to small businesses engaged in research and product development in the field of aging.

“There was really a need for us to go out and make sure that we let folks know that this is available funding,” Toliver said.

A little history: Congress mandated two programs called the Small Business Innovative Research program (in 1982) and the Small Business Technology Transfer program (in 1992), which together are known as “America’s Seed Fund.”

With awards up to $3 million, these are America’s largest sources of early-stage capital for life sciences research, including interventions for Alzheimer’s disease, according to NIA.

These grants are made “to small businesses that are conducting research and development projects that are ultimately going to be products that we want to see commercialized and get into the hands of older adults who need them,” Toliver said.

The Startup Challenge acts as a feeder program to the two larger programs. It’s a way to attract brand-new innovators and teach them how to start a company and apply for federal grants that can be “critical in those early stages of research and development to helping them get their products off the ground,” Toliver explained.

NIA funds 100 companies a year that have products related to Alzheimer’s and dementia, age-related diseases, aging in place, and tools or technologies to reduce health disparities in the aging community.

Mentors and training too

Although only six of the 20 companies participating in the program at any time win the cash prize, Haim said, everyone wins.

“Every winner has agreed that they’ve gotten more value from the five months of mentorship and the accelerator than they did from the $60,000.”

That was the case for Cameron Carter, CEO of a startup called Rosarium Health, named after his grandmother.

Through the Startup Challenge, Carter was paired up with a mentor who supported him while he developed a platform to connect homeowners with remodelers that can help them age in place.

When Carter attended the three-day conference that is part of the accelerator program, he met an investor that ended up being one of his lead funders. Sure, Carter won the $60,000 cash prize but more importantly, he scored $1.6 million in seed funding for Rosarium Health.

“The core [benefits] are the peer network and a mentor network. The money’s nice to have, but it was all the other intangibles that helped me be successful,” Carter said.

So far, 40 companies have participated in the Startup Challenge. One company was acquired; two others went on to win federal grants; and several others have made partnerships with healthcare systems that will allow them to test their products. Burns and Cacchione plan to apply for the larger federal grants.

Haim’s team watches their successes with pride.

“When we receive their pitches at the end, we’re just blown away by the progression that they have made and how much clearer their ideas are,” Haim said.

“They came in with just an idea, but now they literally have a road map. It’s something we just love to see.”

The next NIA Startup Challenge launches this fall. For more information, visit nia.nih.gov/research/sbir/startup-challenge or email niastartupchallenge@nih.gov.