FloDesign Sonics launched in 2012 and has already obtained lucrative contracts to invent acoustic technology with important real-life applications, many of which are medical.
WILBRAHAM -- Later this year, several pharmaceutical firms are planning to take delivery of a machine that could transform the industry.
Into it, they will feed batches of Chinese hamster ovary cells. The cells will ooze proteins that will be captured by sound waves and then used in the production of life-saving injectable medications.
These machines and the technology they employ were developed by FloDesign Sonics, a big-idea company housed in an unassuming building at 380 Main St. in Wilbraham. Right now, once those proteins are collected, the cells die. But this new equipment is a major advancement: The cells survive the process and can be reused again and again, slashing the production time.
"This is the future of drugs," said Stanley Kowalski III, 46, the chairman and founding CEO, during a tour of the facility. "I like to call it the elixir of life. It just keeps giving and giving and giving."
FloDesign Sonics, which touts itself as the "filterless filter company," launched in 2012 and has obtained lucrative contracts to invent acoustic technology with important real-life applications, many of which are medical. The company has developed a new way to use sound waves to isolate and remove particles from a fluid, which can clean the surrounding material or allow for the study of anomalous masses, among other possibilities.
Think of these waves like a catcher's mitt or a three-dimensional net, said Kowalski. The waves capture particles with certain acoustic properties, allowing the rest of the fluid to go by. The isolated particles clump together and naturally separate themselves from blood, water, etc.
"This is 10 times better than anything we've ever seen before," said Kowalski. "We've found tons of people who could use it."
If the technology can be translated into something like a smart watch, it could significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to make a cancer diagnosis, allowing medical treatment to begin sooner and possibly greatly improving the likelihood of survival.
Kowalski said that particular advancement would be "potential Nobel Prize territory," even though it's a "pipe dream" right now.
"Imagine if we can stop a circulating tumor cell in the blood, on a FitBit if you will, or the Apple watch, and you set off an alarm bell," he said. "The applications are making our heads spin."
Another machine, not much bigger than a coffeemaker, has been successfully tested and shown to reduce the amount of debris, like fat cells, picked up by blood during heart bypass surgery. This debris is a serious problem, causing strokes and adding what could be weeks to post-operative care.
Less debris in the blood means it can be put back into the body more safely. This may even eliminate the post-op complication known as "pump head," a form of brain damage that raises serious questions about the possibility of cognitive recovery.
"It shows early indications it will work" in tests with pigs, said Kowalski. "We've seen over 90 percent reduction in the debris field."
The National Institutes of Health is funding this work.
The U.S. Army gave FloDesign Sonics a grant to find a way to identify anthrax spores in reservoirs using sound signatures. Hospitals are interested in gene manipulation and personalized cell therapy, while blood banks could use this filtering technique, as well.
FloDesign Sonics is working on a laboratory scale to clean up water after fracking operations. This work also is funded by a federal grant.
FloDesign Sonics, based in Wilbraham, is working on a laboratory scale to clean up water after fracking operations. This March 20, 2015, photo shows their prototype at work.Brian Steele | MassLive.com
Fracking is the controversial practice of using water and chemicals to break open rock, releasing natural gas. FloDesign Sonics is testing a machine that gets contaminants out of used water onsite so it can meet environmental standards and be reused immediately.
Kowalski said, right now, fracking companies have to go through an expensive and complex process to reduce the contaminants from about 1,000 to 30 parts per million, as required by regulations. Someday, he said it may be possible to go all the way down to five parts per million.
FloDesign Sonics has filed more than 100 patent applications in the acoustics field in the past two years, and it has three approvals under its belt, as well as several permissions to proceed with marketing and sales.
Walter Presz started FloDesign in 1990 while working at Western New England University, and the sonics division is just one of many companies under the umbrella. Another manufactures wind turbines that attracted the attention of green energy advocates at the tail end of the last decade.
Former Vice President Al Gore and former Secretary of State Colin Powell visited with the team to familiarize themselves with that work. The turbines are made at a facility in eastern Massachusetts.
In 2008, FloDesign Wind Turbine was seeking capital, but local investors were skeptical and tight-fisted, so the money came from Silicon Valley.
In recent years, that's changed as groups like River Valley Investors, MassMutual and others have recognized the potential of tech startups and established companies in the Pioneer Valley. The Springfield Venture Fund was established by MassMutual in 2014 to provide seed money to fledgling businesses in, or willing to relocate to, Springfield.
Other FloDesign companies have made grenades, race car technology that was almost immediately banned for being too advantageous, and a muffler for aircraft engines. Actor John Travolta bought one of those mufflers, Kowalski said.
"You can build in Western Mass. if you find the right market opportunities," he said. "That's how we pay the money we do and how we make it here."
Many of the people making these leaps forward were educated at Western New England University, including Kowalski, who said they are able to hold their own against graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of his partners are professors at WNEU, as well.
Managers and employees of the Wilbraham-based acoustics company FloDesign Sonics pose for a photo at the end of a meeting on March 20, 2015.Brian Steele | MassLive.com
Kowalski works with important thought and financial leaders in these fields, including the former CTO of GE Healthcare, a researcher who worked on the groundbreaking Human Genome Project and an influential mathematician who had an acoustics equation named after her and two colleagues.
As of this writing, FloDesign Sonics is hiring. They're looking for a senior ultrasonic research and development engineer, a senior electronics and control engineer, and a biopharmaceutical process engineer.
The innovations are not over.
Joe Salvador, a FloDesign employee, is spearheading an armaments company that will manufacture firearm suppressors at the request of the U.S. Marine Corps. Kowalski said the Marines spend $2 billion a year on care for servicemembers and veterans who suffered hearing loss because of their weapons.
Despite what you've seen in James Bond movies, a suppressor does not silence a gunshot; it makes the weapon somewhat quieter, but the sound is still loud. A second problem Salvador hopes to address is the short lifespan of a suppressor compared to a gun barrel.
Salvador's project aims to create a better suppressor that will protect the Marine and save the military money long-term. His left arm is elaborately decorated with tattoos of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, inspiring the company name: Da Vinci Armament.
He said all of the manufacturing is done with parts sourced from within a 30-minute drive of the Wilbraham facility, and that will be the case at least until production scales up. It's not clear when that's expected to happen.
Some may ask why this work is happening in Wilbraham and not California or Boston. Kowalski said he and many others with links to FloDesign and its various offshoots have local roots. His father was dean of WNEU's business school.
Kowalski is a Northampton native and attended Wilbraham schools from the third grade on. Presz, FloDesign's founder, was his youth baseball coach; Presz has a small street in town named after him.
But it's not all because of a love of home. Operating out of a small town in Western Massachusetts is a practical choice.
"We have some of the highest PhD per capita in the world in Western Mass.," said Kowalski, "and the biggest problem we have is that a lot of the ideas are not commercialized. It's the connection between academe, the research, and building companies around that."
He said talent retention is still a problem for this area, but the tide is turning as entrepreneurial incubators pop up and angel investors nurture aspiring inventors and business owners.
Kowalski compares these shifts to one of the main components of his company's machine to help make those "buy or die" drugs. In order to keep the cells alive after harvesting, they're pumped with nutrients, much like pumping capital into such projects will create a new "ecosystem" of entrepreneurs in the Pioneer Valley.
Kowalski works with Valley Venture Mentors, an entrepreneurial guidance program and accelerator that's helped companies like Tech Foundry, White Lion Brewing Co. and Artifact Cider.
Scott Foster, a business and entrepreneurial lawyer in Springfield, co-founded the program in 2010. He had strong praise for Kowalski and his work.
"He's not content to just support his own company," said Foster. "One small innovative company out here is alone on an island. It needs to be surrounded by a hundred."
Foster said Western Massachusetts could be "the next Boston" for innovators. In fact, he said this area has its advantages over the state capitol and Cambridge; the relatively small size of the business network makes it possible to know all the major players, something that would be impossible in those cities.
"You don't have to go very far," said Kowalski, offering words of wisdom to capable people with big dreams. "We've got activity in the region."
