So Reynolds, who had experienced the power of the Internet in the quest for his miracle cure, started his own business -- an IT consulting firm called Expand the Knowledge, which helped medical researchers coordinate their work online. "I worked 100 hours a week, went to school, and slept three or four hours a night," he says. "I wanted to make the most of my second chance." After selling his business and earning additional degrees in technology and engineering management, Reynolds went to work at Siemens USA, a division of the German electronics and electrical engineering giant, where he was identified as an emerging leader and put into a special mentoring program. Soon, he was director of global business development. In 2005, Siemens offered him the chance to attend the Sloan Fellows Program at MIT, a prestigious one-year M.B.A. program for midcareer executives whose graduates include Kofi Annan and Carly Fiorina.
It was at MIT that Reynolds heard Langer give a talk on a novel treatment for SCI. Langer, an MIT Institute Professor with some 750 patents issued or pending worldwide, was one of the first people to apply chemical engineering methods to medical applications, pioneering the use of specially designed polymers for targeted drug delivery and tissue regeneration. The 100 or so researchers in his lab develop ideas on those basic themes. The technologies they spin out have been licensed or sublicensed to more than 220 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotech, and medical device companies.
In the mid-1990s, Langer was working with colleagues at Harvard Medical School to study the idea of using biomaterials in combination with cells or drugs to improve functioning in people with spinal cord injuries; he published the results of rodent studies in 2002. After Reynolds introduced himself and shared the story of his recovery, Langer asked him to become the unofficial "business person" on his team working on SCI treatment. Reynolds helped with grant applications, identified opportunities in the SCI treatment market, analyzed research data, and devised a product development strategy. This work turned into his M.B.A. thesis, "InVivo Therapeutics" -- and the business plan for a company of the same name, which would move Langer's technology out of the lab and up the ladder from rats to primates and ultimately to humans. In November 2005, Reynolds filed incorporation papers, began securing the relevant patents from MIT's technology transfer office, and gave notice at Siemens, a company he loved.
"Frank had a great opportunity at Siemens to return to," says George Nolen, the recently retired CEO of Siemens USA, who mentored Reynolds in his early years at the company. "But this was a passion and a personal dream for him. You always hate to lose people who are talented, but I told him, 'You may only get one chance to chase a personal dream. God bless you and the people you want to help."
Angling through a parking lot on a trajectory that gets him from his office to the Langer Lab at MIT in about three minutes, Reynolds strides along like some kind of baby-faced Irish gangster, in a tailored pinstripe suit, metallic tie, designer eyeglasses, a Rolex, and the chunky MIT ring that marks his membership in what he jokingly refers to as "a secret society." As always, Mitarotondo is at his side. The two are on their way to meet with Chris Pritchard, a 24-year-old Ph.D. candidate and Langer protégé, with master's degrees from Oxford and MIT, who heads InVivo's research and development efforts.
Reynolds is unabashed about preferring young employees. "We'll need tenured people with great experience as the company evolves," he says, "but in these early, innovative days, we need sharp people who really don't have any preconceived notions." Plus, he adds, Pritchard knows as much about the science as anyone. At biotech start-ups based on cutting-edge technologies, it is often the case that graduate students are among the most knowledgeable people available. And the price is right. InVivo paid for a year of Pritchard's graduate fellowship and funds his research in Langer's lab; in exchange, Pritchard brings to InVivo insights gleaned from some of the smartest scientists working in biomaterials anywhere.
Aside from Pritchard and InVivo's medical director, a prominent Boston neurosurgeon named Eric Woodard, In-Vivo's virtual R&D team consists of consultants and a handful of big-name advisers -- including Richard Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Medicine -- who work in exchange for InVivo stock options. (Langer and Woodard receive advising fees, in addition to options.) Roberts, a research scientist at New England Biolabs, has a personal reason for wanting InVivo to succeed: His oldest son has been quadriplegic since being injured in a car accident.
In a cramped, cluttered conference room adjacent to Langer's office, Reynolds and Pritchard start their meeting by discussing the timeline for publishing the results of InVivo's primate studies. The goal, Reynolds says, is to create "a cascading series of events" leading to the human trials later this year. For now, however, they settle on a plan to submit a paper to a neuroscience journal, in which they describe the novel techniques InVivo has used to evaluate SCI and recovery in primates. A more comprehensive paper, which Pritchard and Langer aim to publish in the influential science journal Nature, will be written once all the data from the final primate trial have been analyzed. Assuming, of course, that the results are good.
While they await those results, Reynolds and his team stay busy by laying the foundations for InVivo's next generation of products, part of what Reynolds envisions as a suite of spine-related therapies. His ultimate dream is for InVivo to become as big and influential as other biotech firms in the neighborhood. "I look forward to being Biogen," Reynolds says. Given that Biogen is a $4 billion giant best known for its cutting-edge cancer treatments, the comment seems outlandish, even slightly delusional. On the other hand, Biogen has its roots in a Cambridge start-up founded in 1978 by MIT and Harvard scientists working in small, separate labs on then-radical theories, pursuing research dead ends and racking up debt until blockbuster drugs for treating leukemia, MS, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma brought major commercial success.
