A scientist, an investor and two entrepreneurs weigh in on Oregon’s fledgling nanotech industry.
BY APRIL STREETER // PHOTOS BY ERIC NÄSLUND
Nanoscience — the study of particles as tiny as a billionth of a meter in size — is opening a brave new world. Such particles can behave very differently from larger particles or molecules, and they offer tantalizing improvements to post-modern life: everything from an embedded skin chip whose nano “pores” help tell when it is time to dose with insulin, to tiny dots that form a coating to make eyeglasses scratchproof. But as with all newfangled technologies, nanoparticles can bring unforeseen dangers, as too little is known of their effects on humans and the environment.
For more than a decade, Oregon has built a network of support for new businesses utilizing the novel properties of nanoparticles to innovate in health care, electronics and manufacturing. But the payback — a cluster of healthy businesses drawing more of the same to Oregon — has yet to materialize.
Two of the biggest nano-related companies in the U.S. have a presence in Oregon, nearly across the street from each other in Hillsboro: electron-microscope provider FEI and Intel Corporation. The latter has shipped hundreds of millions of products that incorporate nanotechnology, and there is an Intel connection at practically every nano-related business in Oregon.
On the public side, Corvallis-based Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) is the nexus of local nanoscience advances, helping bootstrap nano-related startups with investments, access to facilities and equipment, and links to the local talent pool. Other members of the support web include the state’s Oregon Innovation Council; business accelerator and tech transfer programs at Portland State University, OHSU, OSU and the University of Oregon; and the Oregon Translational Research and Development Institute (OTRADI).
“It’s a very collaborative community in Oregon,” says ONAMI’s executive director, Skip Rung. “Everyone knows everyone.” Rung says he expects and hopes that in addition to the millions of dollars in sales of Intel chips with “nanotechnology inside,” new nanotech businesses in the state will be worth up to $100 million within the next decade. The global market for nanotechnology is expected to be $50 billion by 2017.
But the pressure is on, as currently there isn’t a substantial stock of seasoned, medium-size Oregon nanotech companies, nor has a nanotech concentration or specialty emerged here. Instead the state has an abundance of companies in early, nonrevenue-generating stages.
There is Beaverton-based Puralytics, which recently began selling the SolarBag water purification system, based on nano-size photocatalysts that break down contaminants with the aid of sunlight. CSD Nano in Corvallis makes antireflective coatings for solar cells and is currently exploring coatings to reduce infrared light and heat from seeping through window glass to make it a superior insulator.
These and other fledgling companies basing their innovations on nanotechnology have glimmers of promise but no guarantee of mainstream success, nor a similarity between them that might be a magnet for venture capital.
“We don’t yet have a nano cluster,” says Eric Rosenfeld, founder of the Oregon Angel Fund, a local venture capital firm. “We have the foundation and some real assets. Now we need more companies to achieve greatness, success and wealth.”
To find out what it will take to make that happen, Oregon Business met with four individuals who play different roles in the state’s nano ecosystem: a researcher, an investor, and two entrepreneurs. The conversations revealed a wealth of energy and drive that could make Oregon a big beneficiary of nanotechnology’s economic rewards. Just not quite yet.
The Scientist
In general, tenure-track professors are obsessed with the number of papers they publish. Traditionally, it’s the best path to getting the prized tenure contract.
Not in the Goforth lab, a small space in a nondescript building on the Portland State University campus where Andrea Goforth, an inorganic chemist, and her team of postgraduate students do their work. Hired by PSU as a junior professor at a time when federal grant money hasn’t kept pace with demand, Goforth isn’t as focused on churning out papers as might be expected. Instead she’s been able to follow her two current research passions: biomedical imaging agents at the nanoscale and the novel properties of the chemical element bismuth, the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol.
Although they seem disparate, Goforth’s two enthusiasms actually feed each other. Goforth, 34, has a patent on her discoveries regarding how tiny bismuth particles, which are radiopaque — visible on X-ray — may also be easier on the human body than barium and suitable for use in medical devices.
What is also novel about Goforth’s discovery is how quickly she’s turned it into a product idea — add-ins to surgical sponges — and parlayed the idea into a company called Hawthorne Materials Corp.
“It’s not typical of chemists in an academic environment to be thinking so much about commercialization,” Goforth admits. “With federal funding as low as it has been, though…academic institutions stubbornly stuck on getting Fed money are starting to realize we need to collaborate locally.”
Goforth has done that — she heaped praise on ONAMI for connecting her to electron microscopes integral to her research. In addition to the enthusiastic engagement of her postgraduate student Anna Brown, the university’s MBA students and technology transfer office helped Goforth zero in on market potential and appropriate products to be created from the radiopaque bismuth particles. Toxicity testing of the “Bismarkers,” as they are currently called, is proceeding.
Goforth says her partners know marketing Bismarkers will never be of higher priority to her than doing basic nanoscience. Yet she’s also clear that pursuing new commercialization possibilities, is, in a sense, a part of her job, much like teaching the next generation of scientists and publishing her research findings. As a transplanted Tennessean, she loves Portland and hopes that Oregon can develop its research in nanotech into some kind of cluster or hub.
“Relative to Seattle’s prominence, nanobiotech might be a bit more difficult to cultivate,” she says. “With Intel here, nano in device integration is more likely. Maybe we could be the happy middle ground and develop a bit of a hub for both.”
Goforth’s partner, Brown, always thought she would be academically bound. Now nanotechnology and the bismuth research are changing her trajectory.
“The world doesn’t need more professors,” she says. “I’m hoping instead I can translate that high-risk, high-reward startup mentality of the software industry to nanomaterials. That feels like a career calling.”
What’s good for her could also be good for Oregon. “Maybe there’s no way we’ll compete with Silicon Valley,” says Brown. “But anchoring a nanomaterials industry into the Pacific Northwest? From my little bit of experience with the Oregon Angel Fund, that seems to be what investors are getting excited about.”
The Investor
Oregon Angel Fund founder Eric Rosenfeld would agree that he and his band of intrepid investors are enticed by nanotechnology. He’s also quick to note, however, that OAF investors tend to gravitate toward Oregon industries “where there is already a concentration or cluster of talent to draw from,” i.e., not nano-inspired businesses. Since 2007, OAF has put together a fund each year (this year’s is $5.7 million with 130 investors) with the aim of making four to seven company investments, from $100,000 up to $1 million.
Prior to 2011, Rosenfeld says, OAF didn’t have particular investor expertise in the nanorealm; roughly 50% of the last two funds’ investments were in software-related companies. However, the due-diligence committee formed to explore investment possibilities in Portland-based Pacific Light Technologies helped shift that. OAF has given money to Pacific Light and NorthShore Bio, and now has an investment offer pending with bioMetric Holdings.
Rosenfeld, 48, says OAF searches for “showstopper” ideas among the 100 to 200 business plans they see each year. Intel alumni are a source of both investors for OAF funds and ideas for companies; Rosenfeld says Intel is almost like having a semiconductor university in the region.
“We see the really neat stuff, the nano innovations, happening at the intersection of different disciplines rather than within the core disciplines,” Rosenfeld says. “Like in the case of NorthShore Bio, where people coming out of Intel who understand semiconductors are coming together with others who get digital biology, to develop sensing ‘nanopore’ chips. And even Pacific Light, which blends expertise in electronics with advances in nano-level optics.”
Despite enthusiasm for OAF investments in these “intersection” nanocompanies, Rosenfeld is clear that an economic success is now needed, and the sooner the better.
“It’s still early, but we need a success and some wealth generation to initiate that cycle of wealth creation,” he says. “The cycle works in Seattle and the Bay Area, but it hasn’t happened here in nano.”
Practically speaking, without a nanocluster, whether in digital biology, electronics or some other area, supply chains don’t develop. Existing companies also have less of a local talent pool. In addition, as Rosenfeld explains it, OAF is typically a first or lead investor in local Oregon startups. As companies go through further funding rounds, however, Oregon’s venture capital community may not be big enough, and some startups may bow to demands to pick up stakes and move nearer the Silicon Valley investor community.
“We have the inklings, the embryonic stages,” Rosenfeld said. “But these days it actually takes a village to grow a successful company.”
The Entrepreneurs
The office of Pacific Light Technologies in the Portland State Business Accelerator building is a hive of intensity. In a cramped room without any reception area, workstations are aligned in tight rows, and many employees don’t look up from their tasks when the office door creaks open.
One of the founders of the company, Juanita Kurtin, and current CEO Ron Nelson emerge from the back row of desks and head toward a small conference room across the hallway. Kurtin, 38, an Intel alumni and previous employee at the Intel-funded SpectraWatt solar company, started PLT after SpectraWatt went bankrupt in 2011. She felt SpectraWatt’s research in quantum dots — tiny nanocrystals that glow when stimulated by a source such as ultraviolet light — was too good to let languish.
Nelson, a seasoned veteran of at least two successful startups, is a 2010 transplant to Oregon from the Bay Area. Nelson says he was skeptical about nanotechnology. But after he saw Kurtin’s pitch on how PLT dots could make LED lighting soft, white and pleasing — and less expensive — he led the due-diligence investment team for OAF, then stepped down to become PLT’s CEO.
Another employee brings in a box, bigger than a shoebox but smaller than a breadbox, affixed with two dome-shaped lights on its top. One of the lights is a standard LED whose glass cover has a heavy-metal-based phosphor coating — the same type used in fluorescent lights. The other light, which Kurtin turns on with a small knob, is like a softer, warmer and still incredibly bright version of the first one. On the inside of this light’s small glass dome is a coating of nanocrystal quantum dots that make the second light more pleasant to the eyes than the first. PLT believes its coating will not contain expensive “rare earth” metals and will be cheaper than phosphors to produce and sell. Currently, a 100-watt LED bulb retails for more than $50.
Nelson is quick to say PLT expects to produce its quantum-dot coating in marketable amounts this year and generate revenue by 2014. PLT has surmounted quantum dots’ reliability issues for use directly on LEDs, and will “soon” begin production, he adds, without specifying where.
Oregon, Nelson says, has been good to PLT. “As a transplant from Silicon Valley, the startup climate is better than I thought it would be. Within 60 days from my first email about PLT, we managed to get the team together, get money, buy equipment for pennies on the dollar from SpectraWatt, and get going.”
Nelson and Kurtin are keenly aware that in spite of PLT’s strong patent portfolio, a good team and trade secrets, the startup is in a very crucial time. “We have three major competitors making coatings for similar applications. It is survival of the fittest,” Nelson says. “A lot of what will happen can’t be predicted. It can be a great technology and be too early or too late, miss its window or somebody just out-executes.”
Nelson doesn’t try to peer into the company’s future, keeping what he calls “necessary blinders” on to focus on the formidable challenge of getting the company’s coatings to market.
“Even with a sexy technology, you have to solve real problems and build a business based on what your customers really need. While I like the challenge of creating an economically sustainable company and making lighting better across the world, it’s also a bit like playing the roulette wheel.”
He acknowledges that venture capitalists are always nervous about having their investments far away, and he has firsthand experience trying to manage an unsuccessful Pasadena, Calif. company that was distant from its Silicon Valley investors. But ONAMI got PLT off the ground with $250K of seed money, and Nelson hopes to be in Oregon for the long run.
“Those dollars really powered this thing,” he says. “It was probably the difference right there of PLT staying in Oregon and making it or having our technology wither on the vine.”
April Streeter is a Portland-based freelance writer. Her most recent article for OB was “Farm Futures.” She can be reached at [email protected].
