Growth Snatchers

Growth Snatchers

TECHNOLOGY by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

A Gulf Coast firm with a niche in making synthetic lifelike body parts for medical testing seeks $1 million in real investment money.

Chris Sakezles has just enough body parts scattered around his office to make cops nervous and coroners jealous.

But it's all in the name of research.

Not for a whodunit crime novel, but for the business of creating synthetic human tissues and body parts for the medical device, research and teaching industries. The idea is that these detailed, so-real-it's-scary parts, from a thigh to an eyeball, can replace mannequins, cadavers and even live animals in testing laboratories. Military manufacturers working on ballistics testing can even use the parts, Sakezles says.

"This technology, at its simplest, is copying human anatomy," says Sakezles, whose name rhymes with Hercules. "We are looking to revolutionize the way medical testing is done."

Sakezles has been working on it since 2005 through his Sarasota-based company, Animal Replacement Technologies. He founded the firm while working as an independent consultant in the medical testing industry in Princeton, N.J., spending most of the first year or so on getting patents.

It was his contacts in the New Jersey medical research community that led to the company's first, and so far biggest, client: Medical research giant Johnson & Johnson.

Since then, from about $500,000 in loans from friends and family, Sakezles, a Tampa native, has moved the company to Sarasota and hired 15 employees. He declined to release revenues, saying only the company has yet to make significant profits. Says Sakezles: "We have enough on cash flow to keep going."

That said, Sakezles is now focusing his attention on growth. He is seeking $1 million in private equity in return for common stock at $1 per share or convertible bonds with a 15% interest rate. In an offering launched Aug. 15, Sakezles says he's seeking a minimum of $10,000 from individual investors and at least $50,000 from corporations.

The funds, Sakezles says, will go toward a combination of projects, including more than doubling the staff to 35 and opening a new research laboratory in Silicon Valley to go with the Sarasota office. What's more, Sakezles hopes to have as many as 350 employees by 2009 and, if his ambitions are realized, would consider taking the company public by 2010.

Innovative recognition

In lieu of profits, Sakezles, the company's president and chief technology officer, has been relying on validation, admiration and acceptance as a source of equity.

Sakezles's contacts with Johnson & Johnson spawned a few new clients, for instance. Those include Tampa General Hospital; Cook Medical, a Bloomington, Ind.-based medical manufacturing firm; and St. Paul, Minn.-based St. Jude Medical, an international medical device firm.

In February, the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded the company a Recognition of Excellence in Innovation certificate during a ceremony at the Pepin Heart Hospital in Tampa. Robert Cresanti, the Commerce Department's under secretary for technology, presented the award to Sakezles.

The Gulf Coast medical community has also been tracking the company. Dr. Deborah Sutherland, the associate vice president of the Health Sciences Center at the University of South Florida and the medical school's associate dean, learned about Animal Replacement Technologies through a professor in the schools' neonatal department.

Dr. Sutherland says the school uses cadavers, which can be costly due to scarcity, and animals, such as pigs and hogs, in a variety of simulations and classes. But those don't "feel like skin and touch like skin," she says, such as the ones at Animal Replacement Technologies. Adds Dr. Sutherland: "Chris' are more lifelike and real."

The school has also recently become a client, adding the products to its other testing tools.

In a final piece of validation, a few medical and biotechnology companies have made offers to buy Animal Replacement Technologies over the past few months. Sakezles has turned down the offers though, saying he wants to see the company through its potential growth boom first.

"This will be a disruptive technology," Sakezles says. "Once we complete this offering, we will be making a lot of noise in the marketplace."

Diligence and determination

Sakezles brings a weighty academic background to his company. He has a mechanical engineering degree from USF and earned a Ph.D. in polymer science from the University of Florida in 1998. From then until founding Animal Replacement Technologies, his work revolved around designing medical devices.

After working in Florida for a few years post-Ph.D., Sakezles moved to southern New Jersey, near a cluster of medical device firms, including Johnson & Johnson. He founded his own consulting firm there, Princeton Product Innovation.

Sakezles' first entrepreneurial lesson with his new business was that competition breeds innovation.

Specifically, he noticed that lab tests for medical devices, be it for basic catheters or stents for heart surgery simulations, were deficient in the area of test bodies and subjects. Cadavers, for example, besides being costly and scarce, didn't provide the best teaching example because the bodies had no reactive tissue and veins.

Sakezles thought there had to be a less costly and more accurate way of testing medical devices. So, using a combination of more than 15 ingredients made up of water, salts and fibers, he began recreating the human anatomy.

Despite his extensive science-based education, Sakezles knew little about anatomy. He learned it on his own has he developed the products.

And as the products he was creating morphed from idea to reality, Sakezles also learned his second entrepreneurial lesson: Diligence and determination. He filed paperwork for his first patent in 2005, for example, but it took more than two years to be issued. Sakezles now holds 10 U.S. patents and has two pending international applications.

While Sakezles says there are no companies doing exactly what Animal Replacement Technologies does, the medical testing industry is still highly competitive, as well as fragmented. One company, while not a direct competitor but one with a similar mission of improving medical testing, is Sarasota-based Medical Education Technologies Inc., a runner-up for the Review's 2005 Technology Innovation Awards.

The company manufactures computerized mannequins that replicate a human being. Its simulators, better known as Stan, for Standard Man, have a pulse, a heartbeat and can even breathe in oxygen. The company has sold the simulators to teaching hospitals and medical schools, among other clients.

Sakezles plans to target medical schools as potential clients, too, when the company's products are more established.

In addition to its uniqueness and efficiency, Sakezles plugs one other aspect of the company's products: Everything at Animal Replacement Technologies is, well, replaceable. A client can buy a thigh, for example, and later buy replacement tendons for it.

As for the company name, it sounds much more idealistic then Sakezles says he truly is. The goal has always been to build a business that can replace the old way of doing medical testing. That includes, but isn't limited to, animal testing. "Being an animal lover and all that is great," he says, "but it isn't why I do this."