· The smell of blood draws a crowd. According to Securities Class Action Alert, a Cresskill, N.J., newsletter, shareholder class-action lawsuits have grown by 57% in the past four years -- while the number of companies sued has risen just 4.6%. Meanwhile, National Economic Research Associates notes that between July 1991 and June 1993, 253 of 300 class-action shareholder suits were settled -- often so the targeted company could just get on with its business.
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"Look at this! we've put this whole machine on a card." Excitement rises in Dave Deetz's voice as he appraises a benchtop blood-gas analyzer in the back of Diametrics' building. The machine is a welter of pumps, valves, tubes, tanks, and dials. It weighs more than 100 pounds and costs up to $30,000. "A hospital laboratory might have 30 machines like this," says Deetz incredulously. Labs need so many, he adds, because the mechanical devices break down.
Deetz, 38, is a chemist, and his vision of the technology foresaw chemistry displacing the bulky, fallible benchtop machines. That vision materialized in the form of IRMA, shorthand for Immediate Response Mobile Analyzer. IRMA weighs just 3.8 pounds -- about equal to the operating manual of the benchtop machine. Its vital sensor function has been distilled to a one-by-three-inch plastic-and-ceramic card that costs less than $2 to manufacture. IRMA retails for $5,000 -- about the cost of the benchtop machine's annual maintenance contract. It takes five minutes to learn how to operate IRMA. It takes five days of training at the manufacturer's facility to learn how to run a benchtop machine.
The quest to bring IRMA to life began 12 years ago, when Deetz was an electrocardiogram technician on the emergency-response team at the University of Minnesota Medical Center -- awake at times for 20 hours, scrubs on, beeper tuned. In his three years there, Deetz figures he saw 150 people die, some of whom might have been saved if doctors had had immediate, accurate readings on the state of patients' vital blood gases. That's when Deetz first had the vision of a bedside device. It assumed urgency because his father had once had a heart attack. "I kept thinking, 'Boy, I'd hate that to be my father and have doctors guessing wrong."
That led Deetz to learn everything he could about sensor technology. He took a 50% pay cut to go to work for Honeywell, where he began by soldering personal-computer boards. Soon he was writing grant proposals, even though he lacked one necessary credential. "I was told, 'You can't do that; you don't have a Ph.D." Deetz was working on his doctorate at the time and went to the chief scientist, who signed off on Deetz's proposals, telling him, "We'll assign the money to someone else, but you can run the program." Within two years Deetz was running a lab with 14 researchers, many of them Ph.D.'s.
In 1986 Honeywell sold one of its European divisions to PPG. Deetz, already well known to the managers at PPG's biomedical division, came into increasing contact with them after that deal. "They liked my passion," he recalls. "I'm idealistic. This is a quest for me." PPG, which was then considering buying a sensor business, invited Deetz to its Pittsburgh headquarters and asked him to lay out his thoughts on where sensor technology was headed. Deetz spoke off-the-cuff for two hours on his deeply felt view that chemistry would revolutionize the technology. PPG offered Deetz a job on the spot.
PPG eventually decided to start its own sensor unit rather than acquire one. The company sent Deetz to La Jolla, Calif., where it had an association with Scripps Hospital, to set up a sensor unit. Deetz got it up and running in June 1988. The team produced a prototype analyzer in seven months -- after a consultant told PPG it couldn't be done in less than a year. That won the unit PPG's Gold Focus award, which recognizes unusual effort in research. Deetz was invited back to Pittsburgh to address all 600 managers who worked in research and development at the company. "We were hailed as the wave of the future," he recalls.
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Deetz saw the prototype as a worthy first step. "I thought, 'Now it's time to dig down," he recalls. And that meant cracking a critical technological riddle that had vexed many others -- calibration.
Calibration is akin to tuning a piano. The analyzer goes out of tune and must be calibrated prior to every use. There were ways to calibrate the PPG point-of-care device modeled on the large benchtop devices, but those techniques were mechanical, inexact, and inelegant. They did not square with Deetz's vision that chemistry would supplant mechanics and make calibration automatic and transparent to users.
Deetz's inspiration came from Walt Sembrowich, 13 years his senior. Back in 1982 Sembrowich, a Ph.D. chemist, had founded Arden Medical Systems, in Minneapolis. Arden made equipment to analyze electrolytes in the blood. While Deetz was still at Honeywell, somebody brought in one of Arden's sensor "cards" and an accompanying plastic pouch of water, technically called a water-vapor battery, used to calibrate Arden's analyzer. Honeywell's scientists, used to working with state-of-the-art laboratory tools, considered the Arden device primitive. Deetz recalls them "sitting around laughing at this thing." Deetz, who knew otherwise, called Arden immediately. He and Sembrowich subsequently met over several lunches, with Deetz telling his newfound soul mate, "Someday you and I have to find a way to work together."
At PPG, Deetz believed he could use Sembrowich's sensor card and battery as his conceptual building blocks. To calibrate the blood-gas analyzer, Deetz needed to devise a carbon dioxide version of Arden's water-vapor battery. But because blood gases are chemically more complex than electrolytes, creating a carbon dioxide "gas" battery would prove more challenging than producing the water-vapor battery.
Deetz fixated on the technology. "My feeling was, 'We have to do this. We can't compromise on this." Unlike him, claims Deetz, many managers "feel pressure to release products too early, and they get hurt doing that." He adds, "This is a life-and-death test. It's like a pacemaker. It's got to be right."
