HATTIE: How did you get people to give you money?

KIM: Well we were lucky. Two of the senior folks at Hybritech, Ted Greene and Tim Wollaeger, went off and raised money to have a fund called Biovest.

We really didn't have a solid business plan. They knew us, they had seen what we had done within Hybritech, and they thought oh boy the chance to get those three guys back into a lab somewhere excited them. So the way we did the deal was, they gave us a half million dollars, I think they had 6 million total, so they wanted to have half in the first round and half in the second round. And basically, we rented an office space to write that business plan and set out to work on the product idea that we come up with.

HATTIE: So they bet on the horses, not the document.

KIM: Oh absolutely. The document was pretty ugly.

GUNARS: So the real struggle came after we finished the proof of principle, how do we get enough money now to develop the product. And that's where we had to go to the outside venture capital community and that was a very difficult and torturous process.

The first opportunity we had identified really was that there was no rapid way to do a test for drugs of abuse in the hospital. So this isn't really what you would call employment screening, it's to determine whether a patient that arrives in the Emergency Department is in some way compromised by an overdose of either elicit drugs or of prescription drugs. And so that was the first idea and that's what we completed in 1992. The product came out in 1992.

We were profitable at the time and we decided to reinvest a lot of our resources back into a larger scale research and development program. There are several rounds of venture capital financing. None of those rounds were very large for us, so we had to continually prove progress toward the goal of developing this product. Plus we had to bolster our market research so we could prove to our investors that when this product is ready, yes there is a market for. It's big enough to be interesting to you and so you should give us some more money. Continue to give us venture-capital money until we're able to get the product on the market.

I think it took a total of about $21 million in investment before we got the product on the market. So the venture capitalists really cashed out in 1997 when the company went public.

HATTIE: OK so from 1988 to 1987, they sat with you?

GUNARS: That's right.

HATTIE: How did you keep them happy?

GUNARS: Well you continue to make progress, you become profitable so they don't have to inject money into the company anymore. They feel at least comfortable that you're building value.