Entrepreneur Briefs

From Orphan To Startup After being bought and sold and then finally told that he just wasn’t wanted anymore, computer scientist David Jenkins is now calling the shots for his own computer hardware company, Visionary Systems Inc. of New Haven, Conn. It all began in 1986 when Jenkins was working on microchips for array processing boards as part of ITT’s Advanced Technology Center in Shelton, Conn. In December of that year, ITT sold Jenkins’ Cellular Array Processor project, along with its 29 other Shelton-based research projects, to Alcatel N.y., a French telecommunications company. Less than a year later, however, Alcatel closed down all the projects, including Jenkins’ operation. That’s when Jenkins formed Visionary Systems, which develops array processing boards for PCs. The company’s first product now being tested is called the APx Accelerator, which he says will bring “high computing power at low-cost in a desktop machine.” Since the computer accelerator board can be plugged directly into the PC, Jenkins says the APx would enable scientists to perform different kinds of simulation on their PCs, without having to purchase a costly supercomputer. Other capabilities, he says, would include image processing and high-performance computing, since it could perform 3 billion instructions per second, compared with 3 million per second for the current top-of-the-line PCs. Jenkins says the APx, which will be marketed toward universities and engineering companies, should be ready by early 1990. Cells, Instead Of Animals A new kind of toxicity test that would reduce researchers’ dependency on laboratory animals, especially rabbits subjected to the Draize test in cosmetics company labs, may soon be available. Scientists at Molecular Devices, a bioanalytical company founded in 1983, have developed a biosensor device, called a Silicon Microphysiometer, which uses tissue cells instead of living animals. J. Wallace Parce, a biochemist and one of the developers of the Silicon Microphysiometer, along with nine other researchers at the company and Stanford University, says the key advantage is not having to use animals for some tests, especially those involving eye irritancy in which cosmetics, shampoos, and other products are dropped into an animal’s eye and observed for days. The Microphysiometer “can measure in real time the response of cells to cell-affecting agents,” says Parce. He says that the device may provide “a gradual animal replacement” in these types of tests; however, he adds that the use of laboratory animals could “never permanently be replaced.” Parce says that the company plans to market the product to researchers-and-drug-companies by the end of 1990. Scale up For Startups According to Noubar Afeyan, many of the benefits of biotechnology have been limited by the small scale of the enterprises that produce the new field’s products. Afeyan says that as the industry geared up in the 1980s, “the bench scientists were doing the scale-up work.” But now, he says, this task is about to be taken over by a new breed of biochemical engineers. A 27-year-old graduate of MITs NSF-funded Center for Bioprocess Engineering, Afeyan believes he and his commercially minded colleagues can make large-scale production of biotechnology products possible. The Lebanese-born Afeyan, who got his taste for business working for his family’s office furniture manufacturing firm in Canada, has joined Purdue molecular biologist Fred Regnier to start PerSeptive Biosystems Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Last week the two scientists launched their first product line, a series of devices that speed protein chromatography 10-fold through a technique called perfusion. Regnier, who won the American Chemical Society’s Chromatography Award this year, combined his pioneer work in perfusion with Afeyan’s background in engineering to make it possible on a commercial scale. PerSeptive, privately financed by venture capital, is now working on perfusion chromatography equipment that would better existing equipment by a hundred times.

Entrepreneur Briefs

The Scientist Staff

From Orphan To Startup

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