Feature: MSU Inventors Part II
Some MSU faculty are inventors and entrepreneurs, or “inventrepreneurs,” and their work can dramatically impact Michigan’s economic future.
To date, the Lansing area’s most famous inventor is Ransom Eli Olds, who came up with the curved dash Oldsmobile in 1901, the first mass produced car in America. He preceded Henry Ford in this feat by 12 years and was America’s leading auto manufacturer from 1901 to 1904.
That, though, as they say, is old news.
A new crop of inventors are stirring things up in the Lansing area, faculty at Michigan State University who are taking their inventions and commercializing them—and in the process they are creating a “new economy” for Michigan. The players in the Industrial Revolution were wealthy factory owners looming over armies of blue-collar workers. However, in this “new economy,” the players are more likely to wear white collars and to be located in laboratories and/or in front of high-speed computers.
Since 2002, at least 27 start-up companies have been birthed by MSU’s inventive professors and researchers. These faculty members are more than inventors. They’re inventrepreneurs, to coin a title.
“When the university transfers technology out into the world it helps everyone,” says Lori Hudson, director of intellectual property for MSU. “It brings royalty revenue into the university and, more importantly, it gives the people of the state of Michigan technologies that can transform the economy of the state.”
Hudson’s office assists the faculty members in building the businesses based on their inventions. “Some of our faculty have business experience, others don’t,” Hudson explains. “We can’t in a hands-on way influence the private business aspirations of our faculty. But we can provide a range of help to the faculty inventor, from creating a business plan to finding office space to helping write grants.”
One major thrust of MSU scientists is in biotechnology, which some hope can provide new jobs in the future and mitigate the increasing job shrinkage in the waning automobile industry. The premise is that oil, which will run out one day, can gradually be replaced by a whole range of agricultural products, which derive from renewable resources. The whole field is cutting-edge and currently MSU has some 400 researchers involved within this general bio-mass area. The promise is huge. Indeed, there are some state officials who dream that biotechnology could do for Michigan what the microchip did for Silicon Valley.
The combined efforts of MSU faculty inventors and Hudson’s office are in line with MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon’s desire to see MSU become “a land-grant university for the 21st century.”
“Both Governor Granholm and President Bush have tied economic progress to an increasing need to be globally competitive, an idea that’s long been a part of MSU and our land-grant values,” she has said. “As we’ve said before, being the land-grant university for the 21st century and translating that into ‘world-grant’ is really about thinking globally and acting locally, working on behalf of peoples and societies around the world, while rebounding the benefits of that work to the people of Michigan.”
What follows are profiles of three of our faculty inventrepreneurs who are helping transform Michigan’s economy:
JOHN FROST, DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY AT MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY, PRESIDENT, DRATH INDUSTRIES
These have been busy days for professor Frost.
His company, Drath Industries, just finished its first round of funding. In the second round of funding, Drath, now a Delaware-based corporation, is seeking $5 million to $6 million. After that, $20 million.
“Within Drath Industries, there are about three platforms for $100 million businesses we could spin out,” Frost says.
Meanwhile, Drath, which was built using Frost’s full portfolio of patents, recently delivered its first product to a customer, in this case, the U.S. Navy. It was an “energetic plasticyser,” a chemical that will be mixed with another chemical to make a gel used for single-stage rocket fuel.
Lastly, Frost recently opened Drath’s first physical location, near the MSU campus. (It had been a virtual company up to that point.)
Despite all these milestones, Frost is not inclined to spin-doctor an overly rosy outcome for Drath. As a scientist, he’s all about facts, not flights of fancy.
“You have to go into these matters very realistically,” Frost says. “Ninety percent of all start-ups fail.”
The common thread in all of Drath’s products is that they’re derived from genetically modifying microbes.
“We change the software of the microbe so that its operating system causes it to create new molecules,” he explains. “What the microbes make is a function of how we manipulate the microbe’s DNA.”
All of Drath’s products are created from Michigan’s renewable feedstock—which gives Drath a competitive advantage as the world wakes up to its dwindling supply of fossil fuels, Frost notes.
“Over 98 percent of all chemicals currently manufactured in the U.S. are made from natural gas or petroleum,” he says. “If we were planning on living off petroleum long term, we’re screwed. I have no confidence that existing US companies will be able to make the transition needed to a non-petroleum-based economy. It’s just like when R.E. Olds started mass producing automobiles. The carriage makers were displaced. They weren’t changed into something else. They became extinct. GM should have known in the 80s that it was going to have to change its act. Now it’s 2006, and they’re talking bankruptcy. Dow is another GM. They are huge companies, and huge companies don’t reinvent themselves. It’s economic Darwinism. The dinosaurs were replaced by the creepy little mammals that ran underfoot. The petroleum-based companies will be replaced by companies based on renewable resources. My goal is to make Drath one of those companies.”
RAWLE HOLLINGSWORTH, PROFESSOR OF BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AT MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY, PRESIDENT, AFID THERAPEUTICS
Typically, Rawle Hollingsworth is up at 6 a.m. every morning, after but three hours of sleep, roused by several cups of coffee and classical music cranked up loud. (He’s not much of a breakfast person. Now and then, he’ll scarf down a peanut butter sandwich as he’s driving to his lab on the MSU campus. But for the most part, he’s caffeine-fueled.) He’s at the campus by 7:45. He teaches two classes, Chemistry 251 and biochemical microbiology 804, and what with class prep, teaching, working with students, and various departmental meetings, he doesn’t get to his second job, president of AFID Therapeutics, until early afternoon. After that, he’s in his campus office and then his home office, hammering away until about 3 a.m. Three hours later he’s up again and the cycle repeats itself.
“I guess I’m so driven because I’m outward focused,” says Hollingsworth. “I really do believe that as things change, the role of the university in America is going to evolve. The state and federal government will expect more from the university in taking the lead to make sure our country is economically competitive. That will demand more from professors. I’m just ahead of the curve.”
To Hollingsworth, helping the Michigan economy means finding ways to turn Michigan’s agricultural products into new life-enhancing/saving drugs. To that end, he’s formed two companies that have been spun off from MSU. His first, Synthon Chiragencis, was acquired by outside investors in 2002. He used his profits from that sale to fund his next venture, AFID Therapeutics.
“Where do I get all my energy?” he asks. “I don’t know. From the time I started in chemistry, I’ve had so much to do and so little time. I haven’t been driven by the fear of failure. I’m prompted by the promise of success. I know I have a job to do and I shall do it. It’s that simple.”
Hollingsworth founded AFID Therapeutics in 2003, the latest embodiment of his dream to build an “engine” for creating new drugs from plant biomass, which holds 90 percent of the fixed carbon on the planet.
“My mission is to advance the use of agricultural products beyond just food applications.There’s only so much fossil fuel. We’re going to run out. One day, we’ll have big biomass refineries in Michigan just like we have oil refineries in Louisiana and Texas now. The states who are big players in agricultural products will become the major players in materials, chemicals and fuels.”
Hollingsworth started inventing with chemicals as a child growing up in Barbados. After he had taken apart just about every appliance in the house in his unending quest to learn how things worked, his doting father decided to channel his curiosity into a more practical vein and bought him a series of chemistry sets.
“I was always heating things such as wood chips to watch the different materials distill off them,” Hollingsworth recalls.
Although Hollingsworth has developed two companies based on his inventions, he hasn’t let the business of growing a business become his main focus. He’s driven by the science.
“If you’re an inventor trying to build a company based on one of your inventions, you can get caught up in the race to raise money,” he says. “When you get some funding, you can be tempted to think, ‘Okay now how can I turn this into more money?’ That’s not what drives me. I focus on delivering on the plan we’ve presented to our investors. I would never say, ‘Well, I didn’t actually do what I said I’d do but, tell you what, give me three times as much money and another year and I’ll do much better next time.”
KRIS BERGLUND. DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING AND MATERIALS SCIENCE AT MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY, CHEIF SCIENCE OFFICER, DIVERSIFIED NATURAL PRODUCTS, INC.
Before he was old enough to go to school, Kris Berglund would watch his siblings leave the family farm for mysterious parts unknown each morning. To him, the farm was his day-to-day world, every day. The farm and nothing else. He couldn’t see over the tops of the corn stalks, so everything he knew was what he could see from his preschooler’s vantage point—usually at his father’s hip as he dogged his dad around the farm. When you’re out in the middle of a very rural area and the nearest town (of 300 people) is 25 miles away, you tend to get creative when it comes to keeping the farm running. His father would use anything he could find lying about—bailing wire and bric-a-brac—to repair/modernize his various pieces of machinery, always with young Kris at his elbow, watching and learning.
“I guess that’s where my curious nature comes from,” Berglund says. “On a farm, you just figure ways out of making do with what you have handy. You invent.”
Fittingly, Berglund today finds him atop of a modest empire of sorts pieced together by happenstance and opportunism. His company, Diversified Natural Products, was built by combining three separate companies over a period of years – the common theme being that all three businesses were about creating “green” products from renewable resources.
“The story of DNP, sometimes I make it sound like it was all planned, but maybe it wasn’t,” Berglund says.
The story goes like this.
About 15 years ago, Berglund invented a sodium-free salt substitute. (Currently, it’s sold by the name Also Salt, but it’s in the process of being re-branded.) Berglund purchased a building on Chandler Road in East Lansing and began running Also Salt out of it. (The salt substitute is made from lysine, which is made from fermenting corn starch.)
Then another company, Applied Carbochemicals, came to Berglund. The company had invented a way to make a petroleum substitute by producing succinic acid from fermented natural sugars found in corn, wheat, sugar beets and other crops. Berglund worked with them and in the process invented a series of patented products for them.
Then an old friend of Berglund’s, Gary Mills (now COO of DNP), came to Berglund with the idea to produce gourmet mushrooms. Berglund brought Mills and his compatriots into his already-crammed building on Chandler Road.
Three years later, Berglund and Mills decided to combine the three companies into DNP, all based now in Scottville.
From here, things have continued to grow. For example, DNP has developed SES-150, an enriched shiitake mushroom nutraceutical compound designed to enhance the immune system.
“We are a bio-based technology company,” Berglund notes. “We are in the business of developing green products for manufacturers and for everyday living. These are derived from renewable resources. For our customers, we develop effective, useful products that are environmentally neutral. For our shareholders, we create share value by developing bio-based technologies that are economically viable.”
Asked what makes his brain so inventive, Berglund says with with a laugh, “I don’t really know. I think it may actually be somewhat of a character flaw in that I have a short attention span. If I was a child, they would probably give me Ritalin. I want to immediately get to the crux of what can be done to solve a particular problem. That impatience leads to invention.”
*John Draper is a freelance writer based in Seattle.
MORE SPARTAN INVENTORS
After reading A Gallery of MSU Inventors—Part One (Winter 2006), many readers sent us names of other Spartans who were inventors. Here is a sample of more MSU inventors:
- Jeff Harper, ’90, M.S. ’92, of Troy, MI, owns two U.S. patents. He and co-inventor Brian Zustovich invented software algoriths for equipment automation.
- Phil Jackson, ’73, of Cape Coral, FL, invented the Low Profile Modular Revenue Meter (US Patent # 5,933,004), which records the amount of electric power used and transmits the reading via special radio technology to the electric company. It is used in both commercial and residential applications.
- Jon Kabara, retired MSU faculty member in osteopathic medicine now living in Galena, IL, was the first researcher
- Ed LaBudde, ’68, a retired engineer now living in Libby, MT,holds some 40 patents, many of which reached the marketplace—including a dispensing valve capable of nano-liter droplets, a very accurate distance measurer using tonal frequencies, a device that uses ultrasonic waves to measure mass air flow, and a time-delay cluster bomb that uses magnetic induction to set off the delayed explosives.
- Chuck Single, ’49, a World War II veteran now living in Ann Arbor, has several patents in the physics and electrical fields, including one that increased the frequency of analog computers by a factor of 100; he also invented the so-called “Geezer Squeezer,” a clip-like device that controls incontinence in men and allows blood flow so it can be worn for 16 hours at a time.
- Gary Starkweather, ’60, who spent some four decades in imaging, color and hardcopy devices, holds more than 35 patents and has won numerous awards. During his 24 years with Xerox, he invented the laser printer and in 1977 won the Xerox President’s Achievement Award. After Xerox, he worked with Apple Computers, Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Microsoft.