“Does NIAID fund Phase III research conducted by small business grantees?”

No, we do not fund small businesses directly during Phase III: Commercialization, as explained in NIH's Three-Phase Program overview. Instead, our approach is to prepare small businesses for Phase III success by supporting commercialization activities during the earlier phases of our Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

To be clear, a Phase III clinical trial is something else entirely. In the context of clinical trials, “Phase III” indicates a study on the efficacy of a biomedical or behavioral intervention in groups of several hundred to several thousand people to compare an intervention to other standard or experimental interventions as well as monitor adverse effects.