|
<< Start Me Up home
by Michael Matesic
New technologies, new companies and new advancements that yield benefits for people all over the world – they require meticulous market insight, strategic planning and flawless implementation, right?
Well, not always. Not even necessarily. Just ask Eric Starr, who answered the phone one day and changed his life.
Seven years ago, Starr was director of product development at Respironics when a doctor in the Midwest with whom he had worked on a clinical trial asked him to play a very small part in the human genome project. Starr was asked to adapt pulse oximeter technology – a common piece of medical equipment used in emergency rooms and during any surgery or sedation procedures to measure how well the heart is beating and the lungs are breathing – for use with mice and rats in the laboratory.
“When I accepted that project, I had no clue this industry even existed,” says Starr, whose Oakmont-based STARR Life Sciences Corp. today employs 18 professionals and serves roughly 150 labs across North America using his technology to assess the health of genetically engineered mice and rats in a wide array of revolutionary medical research.
“We made one customized device back then and soon found that many other people wanted it for their labs,” Starr added. Last October, the scientists who invented genetically engineered “knock-out” mice were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. “Most people are amazed when they learn that mice are now engineered to replicate almost every human disease that exists, and when they find out that a company in Pittsburgh has created the world’s first device that is able to assess the health of the heart and lungs of these mice, they’re really intrigued.”
STARR Life Sciences is the world’s first manufacturer of pulse oximeter technology that works on mice and rats. Market research performed with the help of Idea Foundry revealed a very wide emerging market for Starr’s product. Starr’s pulse oximeter, sold under the brand name MouseOx™, serves labs performing research into various forms of cancer, heart disease, asthma and other respiratory diseases, hypertension, stroke and other vascular diseases, HIV, sickle cell anemia and other diseases of the blood, as well as labs working on new pharmaceuticals to treat these diseases.
“Our technology determines the breath rate, effort to breathe, heart rate, blood flow and level of oxygen in the blood, all within three seconds,” explains Starr. “It’s non-invasive, and works by simply shining a series of lights through any portion of the body that blood flows. It’s been proven successful even on one-day-old mice, seeing how healthy the mouse is at birth. This is extremely important because researchers working on treatments for babies who were born premature, or babies with fetal alcohol syndrome, or whose mothers had used controlled substances while pregnant, have a tool to study the effectiveness of their proposed treatments.”
Starr’s company is only about 18 months old and is now working to commercialize variations of its pulse oximeter. These variations will fulfill the variety of applications which exists within pharmaceutical laboratories. Fulfilling these applications represents a window to greatly increased sales. According to Starr, the market potential for the pulse oximeter line of products that the company is working to commercialize within the next 12 months is estimated at roughly a half-billion dollars.
The lesson here is that it doesn’t matter how large or small the technology may be – if it meets a unique need in a successful way, you may have just discovered an emerging market and be on your way to achieve meaningful success.
Start Me Up appears bi-monthly in the print edition of TEQ Magazine.
|
