Pathfinder Therapeutics Inc. is a medical device company founded by a group of six clinical and academic professors from Vanderbilt and Washington Universities located in Nashville, TN.

“PTI’s mission is to develop innovative image-guided therapeutic applications that allow physicians to perform more efficient, accurate procedures and improve patient outcomes. Our vision includes the continuing development of a commercial image-guided surgical software platform on which we can build many innovative therapeutic applications can be researched, developed, evaluated in clinical trials, and cleared for sale by the FDA. As the founders have continued to do as scholars in presenting their academic research, we will always act with the utmost integrity and honesty in dealing with all of their stakeholders.”
The first commercial application under development by PTI is a image-guided liver surgical system. They currently have a working prototype of this system.

Image-guided surgery essentially describes using preoperatively acquired medical images as an interactive roadmap during a surgical procedure. Extensive phantom, animal and limited clinical experiments have been performed with the system and the results published in peer-reviewed academic journals. The working system will continue to be utilized in preliminary clinical investigations for liver applications over the next year. The goal in the first year of operations is to develop a clinical prototype that is ready for evaluation in a full-scale efficacy FDA clinical trial.
Dr. James Stefansic, the company’s COO, is the only founder working currently full-time for the business. Jim is doing this while also completing an MBA from Belmont’s Massey Graduate School. “It has been difficult to juggle all of my responsibilities, but fortunately there is some overlap between my work at Pathfinder and some class projects. I am certainly applying what I’ve learned in my courses from Belmont over the last three years. I am pleasantly surprised at how much my coursework transcends into the real world of business.”
The goal for PTI is to position it as an acquisition target, preferably to a large medical device company. They will most likely need to initiate sales and marketing channels before this occurs. Once the initial product has been sold to a larger company, the founders of PTI plan to develop other image-guided therapy applications from their software platform.
Jim has had to make adjustments during his transition from a university to their new venture’s start-up. “It is challenging to work with faculty members at Vanderbilt who were once on my dissertation committee. The setting is totally different and our roles have changed, but we all have respect for each other and the talents we bring to the table. I would not have quit my safe job at Vanderbilt to do this if I didn’t trust everyone involved, especially our President Bob Galloway. It is very exciting to take something that was once a project in the lab and bring it to the market as a medical device that can really improve people’s lives.”
One of the biggest adjestments for Jim has been the pace of his new life as an entrepreneur. “Most definitely is it related to the speed at which things move. Research can be a slow, tedious process and there are usually no hard deadlines in place that constrain your time to achieve a breakthrough result. With Pathfinder, however, our investors have the right to know developments on a week-by-week basis, and this is always in the back of my mind as we plan for the future. I still have freedom in doing my job, but it is certainly a different kind of freedom.”

16th century Russian Icon. Christus Rex

Rob has an interesting post at BusinessPundit on the emotional toll of being an entrepreneur.

On the recommendation of by brother (and former business partner) Tom, I am reading a novel that really captures the emotional side of entrepreneurship. The Coffee Trader, by David Liss is set in the 1600s in Amsterdam, but the emotional roller coaster ride suffered by the main character, entrepreneur Miguel Lienzo, will hit home for almost any entrepreneur today.

Accidental Verbosity has a wonderful follow-up to my post on friends as partners from a few days ago.

I found it more than a little ironic when I came across this post at Cafe Hayek about Harvard (via Coyote Blog). It seems the student culture at Harvard is not very enamored with free enterprise even though their school gets ranked consistently high for their entrepreneurship programs, the latest being a top 25 by Entrepreneur magazine. It seems that student leaders are not pleased with one of their classmates who is marketing a maid service to fellow Harvard students. Not egalitarian enough, so it seems….

At some point every new entrepreneur has to address the question of how much to charge for their product or service. For many entrepreneurs this is one of the most agonizing decisions they have to make during their start-up. For most, they fear charging too much and scaring customers away. Many go so far as to almost seem to be apologizing to the market for having the gall to actually try to compete. They end up charging significantly below what the market may be willing to pay.
There is a good article at NFIB on pricing strategies for new businesses. It offers a simple approach that helps take some of the guess work out of pricing. Do your homework of what the market is charging. Make sure that what you charge covers all of your costs, including overhead. An operating margin of 50% to cover overhead is a good rule of thumb. And finally, build profit into your pricing strategy. Making money is your goal, and you can only create profit if you charge enough.
My only additional advice is to keep your business strategy in mind. If you truly have a safe niche that no other business is competing within, you can charge a little more. However, make sure you really have a niche, as many who think they do are really just offering a variation on a theme. This strategy involves trying to differentiate your product or service to gain existing market share from others, which requires meeting or slightly beating existing market prices.
Remember, pricing your product or service is part science and part art. Gather data about the market, but also follow your intuition about what your customers will pay based on your business strategy.

Wilson Ng posted excepts from a speech he gave to the Junior Achievement of the Phillipines at his blog site bizdrivenlife.net. Some very motivational thoughts for tomorrow’s leaders.