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REVIEW SUMMARY
Individual. Dr. Edward Lin, Sarasota
Industry. Health care, wound treatment
Key. Lin believes his wound care invention dramatically advances what's currently used in hospitals.
Dr. Edward Lin, an anesthesiologist-turned-entrepreneur, is confident he has an invention that will spin complex chronic wound care from a medical headache to a healthcare haven.
Lin, based in Sarasota, even named his invention O-ACE-Sys, for oasis. The system combines a disposable transparent chamber, no bigger than an oxygen mask, with a pump that delivers medication to the wound.
“We have breakthrough technology we can offer for less than anything else out there,” says Lin. “It's heads and shoulders above anything else on the market, or in clinical trials.”
Lin has lofty financial goals for O-ACE-Sys, which is being developed through his company, HealO Medical. He projects $48 million in annual sales in the U.S. by 2016, and $171 million by 2017. He further envisions a host of clients, from teaching hospitals to large medical centers to the U.S. military. He eventually plans to sell the system in China, too.
Dr. Jonathan Fong, chief of cardiovascular surgery at Venice Regional Medical Center, has seen O-ACE-Sys work in tests and is impressed. “I feel this is second-generation wound care,” says Fong.
Lin's unshakeable confidence, though, comes not only from the potential of O-ACE-Sys. It stems from an entrepreneurial belief system, honed over two decades of trying to find the perfect product, that should inspire any would-be inventor or entrepreneur.
The gist of the creed is simple: never quit.
Gutsy move
Born in Taiwan, Lin moved to Malaysia with his family when he was 8 years old. His family was so poor, Lin says, that sticks from the streets and wheels picked from trash were his toys. When he was 16, Lin moved — by himself — to the United States. He settled with a family in Albany, N.Y., getting there through a connection he made with an American Peace Corps official in Malaysia.
“It was a one-way trip,” says Lin, now 58. “I didn't know if I was ever going to see my family again.”
Lin moved to America in 1969. He didn't speak any English when he arrived. But within a decade he graduated from high school, college and the Yale School of Medicine. By the early 1980s, he was at the top of his profession, when he ran the anesthesiology department at an Ohio hospital.
Then, in 1990, Lin gave up practicing medicine. He turned in the stethoscope for a chance to make a living as an entrepreneur and an inventor. His friends thought he should have traded up for a straight jacket.
But Lin says he believed he “could do more for society as an inventor than in medical practice.”
Still, Lin's first entrepreneurial venture was an admitted colossal failure. He founded a company, Ingenious Technologies Corp., that developed multifunction computer keyboards. Lin spent millions of dollars, he says, chasing a licensing deal with large technology companies.
He thought he found a partner, but the deal collapsed days before Lin was to sign a contract. The potential partner canceled the deal due to some internal financial issues.
Lin had no backup plan. And he had passed up opportunities to do business with other firms.
“It was a very costly mistake,” says Lin. “Sometimes life lessons are expensive.”
Adds Lin: “It was a much bolder plunge than I realized.”
Advanced treatment
But Lin is relentless. The O-ACE-Sys, he says, is his boldest invention yet.
The market success Lin envisions, however, won't come easy. For one, the medical products industry is heavily regulated and highly competitive. The regulation side can lead to high costs to test and retest. The competitive side means big players can squash small upstarts.
The plan to address those challenges, says Lin, is to turn the invention into a mass-produced medical device. “My motto is more Microsoft than Apple,” says Lin. “I intend for this to be the standard of wound care.”
The chronic wound care segment of health care is certainly in need of a new standard. Chronic wounds are essentially wounds that don't heal within three months. Those wounds affect about 6 million people in the U.S. every year, according to a 2011 report from Medscape, a branch of health information firm WebMD. Treatment is complicated, and costly: Medscape estimates the nationwide chronic wound care tab is $20 billion.
Not only is wound care costly, treatment options are fragmented and segmented.
To Lin, that only magnifies the business opportunity. “Wound care is a very serious problem,” says Lin. “We badly need a solution to deal with this (and) my solution goes right to the root of the problem.”
O-ACE-Sys does that, says Lin and several doctors who have seen it work in tests, by combining parts of at least five other wound care therapy techniques into one system. O-ACE-Sys, for instance, is mobile. So it can be prescribed anywhere from a hospital to a nursing home to a patient's home. Other care options only work in one place.
The crux of the treatment in O-ACE-Sys runs through the smart pump. That's how a patient can receive a customized treatment plan, from pain medication to wound-specific oxygen doses.
The transparent chamber, meanwhile, the part that looks like a clear-view oxygen mask, is also unique, Lin boasts. That's because Lin, in a company prospectus, says the see-through feature “eliminates the tedium, pain and disruption...associated with traditional dressing changes.”
In other words, no one has to painfully rip a big Band-Aid off a patient. Says Lin: “You can see at anytime in what condition the wound is.”
One other feature is Lin says O-ACE-Sys can be made in a variety of shapes and sizes, to fit all kinds of patients and wounds. He even has a prototype for an O-ACE-Sys boot for diabetics.
'Better healing'
The promise of the O-ACE-Sys system, nonetheless, first depends on how Lin can navigate some other challenges. Namely, he has to raise capital to continue through with the test phase.
Lin estimates he needs about $5 million to get through the next two years. That investment, he says, would provide resources to earn U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of O-ACE-Sys by 2014. Growth estimates explode from there, to the point where Lin projects nearly 30,000 patients could be using O-ACE-Sys by 2018.
Lin has met with a host of prospective investors, from Florida to New York to California. O-ACE-Sys won a top biomedical entry award at a Silicon Valley conference late last year. Lin has used that for a starting point to get in with investors. He also touts several letters of support from esteemed medical industry players, including Stanford University Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic.
Lin has one other advantage in his quest to succeed with O-ACE-sys. That would be the fortitude developed over years of struggle, be it back in Malaysia or Taiwan, or with past entrepreneurial missteps.
“I'm going to provide better healing for less,” Lin says. “I really think this is an exciting development. I'm very confident we will be a successful business.”
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