PA Firms in the Therapeutic Discovery Project Program

from the White House blog:

Every day, millions of Americans benefit from the advances made in the fields of life, biological, and medical science. Breakthroughs in these fields have helped to significantly reduce mortality from many conditions that were once considered fatal. Our support for scientific research is one of our best investments in our future—for the health of Americans and the health of the American economy.

That’s why, today, we’re happy to announce the firms that have been accepted into the Therapeutic Discovery Project Program, which was created by the Affordable Care Act. This program will advance American competitiveness in the fields of life, biological, and medical science by giving tax credits and grants to small companies conducting cutting-edge biomedical research.

The program is targeted towards projects that show significant potential to produce new therapies, address unmet medical needs, reduce the long-term growth of health care costs, and advance the goal of curing cancer within the next 30 years.

So what does this mean? It means that a firm in Oklahoma will continue its attempt to develop therapeutics to prevent the metastatic spread of cancer, and a firm in North Carolina will continue to create a gene therapy-based therapeutic for a lethal inheritable childhood disease—one that currently has no life-sustaining treatment. It means that a firm in New York will continue working on a flu vaccine that can provide protection for a period of several years—with technology that could also be used to develop cancer vaccines.

The Therapeutic Discovery Project Program also means that these firms, and other companies who have been awarded tax credits or grants, have an incentive to keep growing and create high-paying jobs right in their local communities.

We are very excited about the possibilities of this program; it is a great example of the way the Affordable Care Act will help advance research to find life-saving treatments and diagnostics and help U.S. companies lead the way in making innovative medical discoveries.

A number of Pennsylvania firms are on the list. You can check it out at: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=228690,00.html