Tom Barrows:
How it All Began:
I always loved chemistry. When it came time for college, I thought, why would I want to be anything other than a chemist? I went to The University of Georgia for my undergraduate, and then I went to graduate school at Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania. My PhD work was on enzyme mechanisms, enzyme reactions and co-factors. Back in 1969, when I graduated from UGA, you’d instantly be drafted as soon as you graduated from college. I probably would have gone to graduate school anyway, but a lot of people went to graduate school because there was another deferment for graduate school.
Inventing Biomedical Engineering:
Biomedical engineering didn’t exist back then as a profession, so we sort of invented it. I joined this professional society called the Society for Biomaterials, and I started learning about materials in chemistry and biology and how these things came together. Back in the early days of biomaterials, industrial materials were being used to fix broken bodies. The first big success story was the hip implant. People would have degenerative changes in their hips, sort of like a machine without a lubricant, and eventually you would have bone grinding on bone, which is tremendously painful, so people with arthritis of the hips were basically incapacitated. Then some guy decided to use a mechanical ball and socket joint to supplement the injured hip, and it worked. Of course you did have to saw the femoral head off of your thigh bone, but never mind that technical detail. You could ram this stem into the top of the femur and just glue this thing into the bone along with the articulated surface.
It was sort of the first success story of biomedical engineering. Back then, other materials were being used like steel plates and metal rods for fixing broken bones, and then suture materials, thread for sewing up wounds. That’s where I came in at 3M; back when I first started looking at suture materials, they were made out of gut, like sheep or cow intestines, or nylon sutures. Nylon is fishing line, so basically you were sewing people up with fish line. So we thought maybe we could have absorbable, dissolvable suture that was made out of a synthetic polymer. Now, gut and nylon are almost obsolete.
Your First Job is Not Always Your Dream Job:
From graduate school, I took a job at 3M Company in St. Paul, Minnesota. That was the ideal job. Big multinational corporations often had a central research laboratory, Du Pont had a central research lab, Monsanto had a central research lab and 3M had a central research lab. The purpose of central research was to think about the visionary aspect. As long as the profits were high, and money was pouring in, and 3M could reinvest in research year after year, we pretty much had a blue sky opportunity. It was truly an ivory tower of the industrial world. I would have stayed forever, except that the world changed around it. I then worked on tissue sealants, but ultimately 3M said they were done with biomaterials. The problem was that they acquired a company in Santa Barbara that made breast implants and then the next thing you know they were getting sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. The medical products are just a tiny portion of their business and the lawyers wanted to get it all, so 3M said no more implants, no more half-baked medical product ideas. There was just too much liability for medical products; the more invasive they are, the worse the lawsuit. So, I figured in order to do something big I had to go to a small company.
Making the Best out of a Bad Situation in Industry:
I was recruited by a company in Boston to work on surgical tissue sealants, and that became very successful. It was hypergel that had to be kept frozen. After it was thawed out and painted it on the lung during surgery, you shine a light on it to cures it against air leaks. The problem was that Medicare wouldn’t reimburse you for it. The patient isn’t the customer, Medicare is the customer. But that’s what life is really about, it’s everyone scamming everyone else. You have to promise stuff you can’t possibly deliver to get the money and then hope that when the money runs out, you come up with some new idea to scam someone else. That company was bought out so I decided at that point that I don’t want to go back to the big company. This company gave me a fifty thousand dollar relocation budget, all expenses and everything, but I actually got laid off from that company. But when it came time to get rid of me, the CEO came into my office and said, “You know Barrows, there’s no real easy way to say this, but you remember that contract you signed that we would give you two weeks’ pay in lieu of notice? Well we are giving you that two weeks’ pay in lieu of notice. Today is your last day. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? Good luck.” Georgia Tech was my lifesaver because just a year before, there was a 25 million dollar grant that created the Georgia Tech-Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues. I formed a virtual company and took a sabbatical leave and became a visiting researcher, working on scaffolds for tissue engineered bone. When that year was over, I went to work at a company doing hair follicle research, which generated some interest from Bosley.
An Idea to a Company-A Great Step Forward:
Georgia Tech has a bioindustry program and every fall they have a symposium and people from the industry get to hear about the latest that happens at Georgia Tech and also present to Georgia Tech some things. So it’s very easy for a professor to entertain a new idea because he just writes another grant, and he gets the money and hires some students and gets the work done. A small company, though, is a different story because here you have to have a great idea, and you have to have some preliminary data. An idea is just an idea. You can’t patent an idea. An idea has to be produced physically before you can patent it, so typically an investor will find out, “Is it patentable?” Once you patent something and it gets prosecuted you will have demonstrated that it is unique, useful, and unobvious. In order to do what you want to do, you have to do it yourself. You have to create your own company. This is where you separate the entrepreneur from the nine-to-fiver. You can commiserate as much as you want with your other disgruntled employees, but it’s a rare person who is going to put his money where his mouth is and actually take that step out the door. If you believe in an idea, you have to put your stake in the ground and do something about it. So we started a company, Cell Constructs. Here, we are working on two projects, one is cosmetic hair restoration and the other is chronic wounds.
The building which houses Cell Constructs.
You are the Future, but are You up for the Challenge:
It will always improve for the people who have the forefront of intersecting technologies, like combining chemistry and biology. There’s always a need for engineers because you always need someone to build something. As long as people have big ideas for things that solve problems and improve lives, then there should be jobs for them. You guys are the potential future of biomedical engineering. Now it’s your time to decide what you want to do. But I think that if you apply yourself and take the toughest courses you can get, and if you love bearing down on this and learning, then you’re in the right place. If what you’re doing now is torture, and you envy the people playing Frisbee on the quad because you don’t have time to do it, then you’re in the wrong field.
See original article here.
BMED1000 Team 18 Tom Barrows 