RockStep Solutions
This innovation can literally save lives. Some people can’t wait an extra year or two for a treatment to be approved. They can’t afford to be on a clinical trial that fails. That’s what motivates us — and we wouldn’t be able to do any of it without the SBIR program and MTI.
–Chuck Donnelly, Co-Founder & CEO, RockStep Solutions
Using the SBIR program to help pharmaceutical drugs get to market faster
In vivo research is a critical step in the pharmaceutical drug discovery process. It is highly technical and produces a massive amount of data. All this data poses a problem for researchers, as it’s estimated they spend up to 80% of their time just trying to manage it. That’s valuable time that could be better spent doing actual science that helps cure diseases.
RockStep Solutions has created a solution for this data issue. Their innovative digital platform called Climb aggregates, harmonizes and delivers all this critical data, across all teams and throughout every step of the in vivo research process — cutting days off the process and saving organizations millions of dollars in operational costs.
RockStep was co-founded by Chuck Donnelly, a former researcher at Jackson Labs. MTI helped him and his partners apply to SBIR federal funding through the National Institute of Health. MTI then matched their SBIR grants and helped grow their business. Climb is now being used to help develop cures and lower the cost of drugs at over 30 pharmaceutical companies and research institutions. In February 2020, MTI was proud to nominate them for the coveted Tibbetts Award — granted to the company that best exemplifies the goals of the SBIR program.
