Beyond the Lab: Bringing Academic Research to the Marketplace

Medical Device & Diagnostic Industry Magazine
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Originally Published January 2000

In the winter of 1997, Eric Swanson was struggling with a personal and professional dilemma: remain in academia, where he enjoyed an enviable position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), or make the leap into the corporate world and start a company based on a new technology.

Swanson had spent 16 years at MIT, and was at that time the associate group leader of the Optical Communication Technology Group at the Lincoln Laboratory. "It was like an extension of my living room," he says, referring to his office at MIT. "I had a secure job that was exciting; I had a lot of responsibility--it was like family."

But, satisfied as he was with his current research at MIT, Swanson was tempted by the opportunity that some of his previous work had afforded him. In the early 1990s, Swanson had worked with Jim Fujimoto, a professor at MIT, and a student, David Wong, to develop a biomedical imaging technology called optical coherence tomography (OCT). OCT is an imaging modality that produces cross-sectional images of the internal structure of biological tissue without the need for specimen excision. It is similar to ultrasound, except that OCT uses infrared light to generate images instead of sound waves.

By 1996, Swanson, Fujimoto, and Mark Brezinski, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, were ready to launch a second company based on OCT. To do so, however, Swanson would have to leave MIT, an idea he wasn't fully prepared to accept. "It was amazing how difficult it was to make the decision," he says. "I agonized over it for a year."

Eric Swanson made a successful transition from university to corporate life.

After extensive soul searching, Swanson made the move. Following a year of extensive groundwork, he, Fujimoto, and Brezinski launched Boston-based Coherence Diagnostic Technology (CDT) in February of 1998. Despite his long deliberation, Swanson--who initially served as vice president and chief technical officer before switching to a consulting role--has never looked back. "Once the decision was made and I was in our new building," he says, "I didn't regret a thing. In retrospect, it was just such a good decision."

It was not as if Swanson had no idea what to expect from the corporate world. In 1992, he and Fujimoto had founded Advanced Ophthalmic Devices Inc. (AOD), a company that commercialized OCT for specific use in the ophthalmology market. After two years in operation, the company was acquired by Humphrey Instruments, a subsidiary of Carl Zeiss Inc., now Zeiss Humphrey Systems (Dublin, CA).

But throughout his work on AOD, Swanson maintained his job at MIT, a luxury he didn't have--and didn't want--this time around. "That's one thing I learned in the AOD experience," Swanson says. "If you're involved in a start-up business, do it full-time or don't do it." It was tempting to keep the safety net of his research job, he explains, but it proved too taxing to do both. "If you're going to do something like this, you really have to take the risk and immerse yourself right away," he says.

Another valuable lesson Swanson learned in his work with AOD was that using a device in the lab cannot predict problems that might occur in a real-world clinic. "I remember taking this great research instrument that we had used on our own eyes in the lab, bringing it into a clinic for the first time and realizing that there is another huge dimension to fielding technology," he says. The core technology didn't change, Swanson explains, but the user interface did. "We learned that there are a lot of practical engineering innovations that need to be made to an instrument at that stage," he says.

In attempting to deal simultaneously with engineering challenges and business concerns, Swanson also learned that scientists and engineers don't always make good business people. He did it differently the second time around. "There's a lot more to business than technology development," he says. Hiring trained business people in the earliest stages was a key to getting CDT off the ground. "I think it's difficult for entrepreneur types to see the value of bringing in experienced business people early on," he says. "But there are a lot of dimensions to cover, and [researchers] need to let business people handle the business side of things; they need to leave marketing and sales to experienced marketing and sales people."

When asked if he can offer advice to others debating a move from academia to the corporate world, Swanson says it can only be an individual decision. "Ultimately, you have to do what you think will be the most rewarding," he says. Whether in academia or the corporate world, Swanson believes that "if you enjoy it, if it's exciting, then that's the thing you've got to do."

For those considering a switch to the corporate world, however, Swanson thinks the time is ripe. "Venture capitalists right now are flush with money, and they're looking for good ideas," he says. "I recommend to people with good ideas to seize this opportunity, because who knows what the market will be like in five or ten years?"

Robert Drummond is associate editor of MD&DI.

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