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Nanoscreen named Innovator of the Year
By Holly Fisher and Shannon Cavanaugh
Business Journal
“Innovation” just sounds important. It’s the subject of countless books and can be found on the covers of BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Fortune and Inc. magazines. Awards honor innovation, think tanks foster innovation and countless business owners and company executives wonder how they can be more innovative.
But what exactly is “innovation?” A buzzword? A fancy label for a good idea? Does innovation truly exist?
The short answer is “yes,” innovation does exist and is critical to business success, economic growth and a community’s quality of life.
“Unfortunately, innovation has gotten a bad rep for being a buzzword when it really isn’t,” said Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder of Principled Innovation LLC. “If you look around you—at organizations of all sizes—everyone is picking up on one simple fact: we live in a time when customers have more information, access to the Internet, blogging and social media tools. (The only way) companies of any size stay ahead of the competition is to create things that capture the imagination of customers.”
The definitions might vary but the underlying concept of innovation is the same: meeting a need in the marketplace, filling a gap or creating value.
Each year, the Charleston Regional Business Journal honors the 10 top innovators in the Lowcountry, based on factors such as the originality of the new product, the impact it will have on the field, how challenging it was to implement and the value—monetarily or in improvements to things such as health or quality of life—the product will produce.
This year’s Innovator of the Year, Nanoscreen LLC, excelled in all those categories.
No longer will experimental drugs sit in a queue waiting days, weeks, even months to be tested. A new Charleston-based invention will make the testing of new drugs four times faster, potentially speeding up the process of putting new medicines on the market and finding new treatments and cures.
NanoScreen and its 25 employees have changed the world of biotech research by creating the NSX-1536 pipetting head, which sits atop a robotic platform. The pipette head uses contamination-free disposable tips and allows researchers to simultaneously and precisely transfer 1,536 titanium micro-syringes of test drug samples from one location to another quickly and cheaply. This $85,000 piece of equipment is the only one of its kind in the world.
It’s the dream of Daniel Dechert, NanoScreen’s chief executive officer, who is quick to mention the efforts and teamwork of his younger brother and eight others at NanoScreen. Using titanium, the team figured out a way to make 1,536 micro-syringes fit into an area of 3.5 by 5 inches. It took five years of designing and saving pennies.
“It’s a very risky piece of equipment to build,” Dechert says. “Financially, it was a scary thing; I had to work on it on the side and set money aside. But we’re a young company and wanted to make a name for ourselves and what better way to do that than to come out with something that the world says no one could make.”
Dechert’s determined attitude has been with him since childhood. As a boy, Dechert hung out in the family’s machine shop in California, helping his father and grandfather make parts for customers in the aerospace, military and medical businesses. He says he always “liked to do something different” and it is that entrepreneurial spirit with a bit of rebellion that pushed him and his company to create something the research world never expected to see.
Before NanoScreen invented the NSX-1536, the pharmaceutical research industry used a pipette head that contained 384 syringes, which Dietrich created in 1998. Prior to that, the most syringes a pipette head contained was 96, resulting in a much slower and more costly process.
Up until two years ago, Dechert admits he didn’t think it could be done using raw material without a noncoercive coating, but then he discovered titanium and its tolerance and strength. Only in December 2005 did the company finally prove to itself and the pharmaceutical world that the NSX-1536 worked and would change the speed of drug testing.
It took on-site demonstrations at three major pharmaceutical companies before Dechert felt comfortable introducing his team’s creation to the rest of the world. That took place in January 2006 at the trade show for the Society of Biomolecular Screening in Switzerland.
“My reward was introducing it at the Geneva (conference). It was a surprise, and I unveiled the thing to the top research scientists in the world. Their eyes got very big. They couldn’t believe we had built it,” Dechert recalls. “Our trade show booth was packed out into the aisle and I just loved it, loved to do something people said couldn’t be done.”
Even NanoScreen’s name proves what it is capable of doing. “Nano” means one-billionth and represents the nanoliters the NSX-1536 deals in, and “screen” is a common term used in drug screening.
Right now NanoScreen can transfer anywhere from 50 nanoliters to 7,000 nanoliters more accurately than any other company in the world.
Dechert says Japan is his toughest competition and representatives have visited him to discuss creating their own version of the NSX-1536 with disposable tips.
As of its release date, NanoScreen has sold and installed the first commercial NSX-1536 for New Jersey pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. Inc. The company will install its second NSX-1536 for another major pharmaceutical company later this year.
Dechert says the innovation is suitable for the top 50 pharmaceutical companies, but expects that over the next 10 years the market will expand more than 50% to include smaller labs and academic universities who miniaturize the process.
NanoScreen’s recognition as the Innovator of the Year is an exciting achievement.
“We’re very excited to be included in the innovators group. Last year, we didn’t enter the competition because we weren’t sure the product worked,” Dechert says, “but now we know it does and we’re very happy to be included.”
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