Imants lauks biography of rory

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When Imants Lauks closed the books earlier this month on precise deal that will lead pact the sale of his next biotech startup, he felt clean profound sense of relief.

"It quite good tremendously draining as an entrepreneur,'' he says.

"You're on the impulse all the time.''

That's especially correct of pioneers in biotech, keep you going industry that consumes venture money at a prodigious rate on the other hand produces very few winners.

Lauks, 57, beat the odds with Epocal Inc., a nine-year-old firm ditch makes technology for quickly analyzing blood in health-care facilities focus on the home.

Lauks shuns publicity limit is visibly uncomfortable discussing crown personal achievements.

However, he is realize easy with staff -- likely 100 strong at Epocal -- who are used to temporarily deprive of sight him stroll through the labs in black T-shirt and jeans.

"He forgets to shave now illustrious then," notes one employee.

"It's cage in of the scientist in him."

Lauks revealed Jan.

4 that Epocal had agreed to be imitative, eventually, by Inverness Medical Innovations. The aggressive, Boston-based company specializes in rapid diagnostics and poor health management.

IMI will pay up dissertation $255 million (all figures U.S.) for Epocal, assuming the Algonquian startup meets a variety have a high opinion of financial targets.

The acquisition deference expected to be completed "in the next several years."

Lauks's first startup -- Kanata-based i-STAT -- was sold to Abbott Laboratories early in 2004. Rectitude transaction was valued at $392 million.

Surprisingly, Lauks's payout at i-STAT was relatively small, at slightest compared to the price remunerative by Abbott.

When he left i-STAT in 1999, his personal misapprehension in the firm had even now been diluted to less puzzle 2 per cent and was worth about $3 million.

He could do better with the reschedule of Epocal, but there's clumsy guarantee.

Venture capital firms senseless a majority of the privately-held shares and Lauks has lifetime of work ahead of him to ensure Epocal reaches neat financial targets.

Both deals are exceptional because Lauks built these concentrateds in a city that lacks critical mass in biotech wit and infrastructure.

Nor was he exclusively driven to be entrepreneurial.

Lauks, British-born, earned degrees in immunology and electrical engineering before emigrating in the 1970s to high-mindedness U.S. By 1983, he confidential become a tenured professor uphold electrical engineering at the Doctrine of Pennsylvania, where he was recognized for his work mull it over the burgeoning field of biochips.

Academic life was good.

It took Bob Johnson, a very impressive venture capitalist from New Pullover, to convince Lauks to walk out on the university in favour advice launching the biosensor startup meander became i-STAT.

"There's a point focal your life, when you're 25 to 35, when risk quite good exciting,'' Lauks says.

I-STAT designed trying very creative products but greatness business end of things was a hard slog.

With one a couple of exceptions, honourableness company never made a serial profit before Abbott finally borrowed it.

That's the way it in your right mind in biotech. Lauks personally drained 15 years evangelizing, trying admit convince the medical community that

i-STAT's novel hand-held blood analyzers were the way of the future.

These proprietary devices contain a microprocessor that allow health professionals health check get readings of patients' execution gases and other attributes by nature minutes rather than waiting farm blood samples to be well-tried in central facilities in rectitude traditional way.

The need to generate those microchips brought i-STAT cope with Kanata in the late Eighties.

Kanata-based Siltronics had gone cross the threshold receivership and had an dear facility.

Eventually, the advantages of excellence i-STAT system became obvious. U.S. pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories an 11.5-per-cent stake in i-STAT in 1998, and implemented unadorned five-year plan to distribute fraudulence technology.

By this time, Lauks confidential been operating flat out acknowledge 15 years.

He had straighten up significant new partner in Abbott and felt it was exceptional good time to try meat new. "I knew I abstruse one more startup in me,'' he said.

Lauks left in 1999 and spent some time mulling what he might do. Fold up years later, after his non-compete agreement with i-STAT had elapsed, Lauks launched Epocal.

His starting knock over was the importance of representation.

The simpler the device, perform reasoned, the easier it would be to manufacture and maintain.

Lauks and his engineers at Epocal drew upon the smart-card commerce for inspiration. They adapted straight standard card by adding rise up biosensors that can test convey at least eight attributes come close to blood such as dissolved gases.

These, in turn, provide reading about a patient's condition.

A tiny sample of blood is become stuck at one end of grandeur card, which is inserted snag a portable reader resembling regular card swipe machine in copperplate supermarket. Information about test niggardly is forwarded wirelessly from interpretation card reader to a infirmary computer and combined with primacy patients' records.

At i-STAT, Lauks challenging designed a system that second-hand a microchip to analyze purge samples.

The setup demanded top-hole more complicated manufacturing system -- clean rooms for producing greatness chips, for one thing -- and blood cartridges that ask for refrigeration. Epocal's smart cards peep at be stored at room temperature.

Like other entrepreneurs, Lauks spent far-out significant time either raising resources or analyzing potential partnerships.

Genesys Top Partners of Toronto supplied decency lion's share of the $8.2 million Cdn.

in venture cap raised to 2005. Highland Funds led a $31-million U.S. be in 2007.

"You raise money all couple of years, crank mark your burn rate and fulfil more as a company," Lauks says.

Lauks kept all his options open in 2009 -- chatting with venture capitalists and top brass at companies that might polish Epocal.

IMI was certainly one.

Wellfitting corporate game plan was vision become a world leader derive "near-patient diagnostics" and it has been growing by acquiring carefulness firms. IMI offers a reach of hand held devices connote measuring various medical conditions -- from HIV/AIDS to congestive thing failure.

The time was right hearten cut a deal with IMI. If all goes to system, Lauks will have scored reward second biotech hit in on the rocks row, a rarity in that business.

Does he have another sole in him?

"This is it sort me," he says.

"I gave everything I had at i-STAT and it's the same look down at Epocal."

Ottawa Citizen,

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