Entrepreneur’s Success Stems From Research
By CONOR DOUGHERTY
Staff Reporter
Susan Love’s success story could read like a screenplay: A crusader against breast cancer starts a company based on her research as professor of surgery at the UCLA School of Medicine. The company grows and is sold for $167 million.
UCLA officials in charge of the school’s tech transfer program must want to bottle that success.
“I think in order to pull this off you need a certain kind of person, and the vast majority of academics are not that kind of person,” said Love, who was a clinical instructor of surgery at Harvard Medical School for much of the 1980s before coming to UCLA. “Professors have to make the first step in contacting the tech transfer people and at that point they can take them by the hands. But there has to be some initiative.”
Her achievement comes from research at UCLA, where she invented a system for collecting irregular cells from milk ducts where breast cancer is thought to begin. This allows for early detection of the cancer.
While earning an MBA at UCLA’s Anderson School, she started her company, Pro-Duct Health Inc., in 1997 with Julian Nikolchev, who was looking for new applications for scope technology he was working on at a Northern California company called Conceptus.
Nikolchev saw the market potential for Love’s research, so the two, looking to license the technology, contacted Emily Waldron at the UCLA Department of Research Administration and Intellectual Property. “I sat down with them and said ‘If you can work within this framework we can get this done quickly,'” Waldron said.
She said negotiations took only two months, an unusually fast turnaround time that she attributed to the pair’s willingness to accept UCLA’s terms.
In a standard UCLA license agreement, the university retains ownership of the patent. The school also asks to be immune from any liability and to restrict future patent rights. According to Waldron, many start-up firms argue over terms that UCLA considers non-negotiable, extending the process.
Armed with $150,000 in seed money from venture capital firm Weiss Peck & Greer in San Francisco, Love and Nikolchev opened Windy Hills Technology (which would soon become Pro-Duct Health) in Menlo Park in early 1998. Within six months the company raised an additional $3.1 million in venture capital, then another $40 million more through two additional rounds.
Pro-Duct Health started generating revenue in 2000 after its soft launch of the Ductal Levage System. The technology allows doctors to detect pre-cancerous cells by flushing them out of the milk ducts with a saline solution.
Love said that Massachusetts-based Cytyc Corp. came courting last summer. The publicly traded manufacturer of the ThinPrep Pap Test (a new way of Pap smear testing) had a large market share, but analysts believed its product line needed to be expanded.
Cytyc signed a definitive merger agreement in late October, offering Pro-Duct Health $38.5 million in cash and five million shares of Cytyc stock for a total equity value of $167.5 million at the time of the announcement.
Love has since tried to start other companies, such as SusanLoveMD.com, and has not done as well.
“Timing is everything,” Love said.
